


Everything I Love is Out to Sea

by dynamicsymmetry



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Aromantic Relationship, Comfort Sex, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Male-Female Friendship, Medium Chaos (Dishonored), Porn with Feelings, Post-Game(s), Psychological Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-20
Updated: 2020-06-18
Packaged: 2020-10-24 18:36:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 32,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20710661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dynamicsymmetry/pseuds/dynamicsymmetry
Summary: Weeks after the end of the Interregnum, Corvo Attano is struggling to help his daughter begin her reign and rebuild her city, all while wrestling with his own ghosts. He's not the only one haunted.





	1. I was not supposed to be here

**Author's Note:**

> I honestly didn't expect to write this, but ["a tender curiosity" by loveandthetruth](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8078530) has been knocking around in my head since I read it, and the fact is that sexual-relationship-as-comfort-and-even-tenderness-but-not-romance is a fucking _catnip_ trope for me. 
> 
> Further, the option of spying on Callista in the bath - and even more, _jumping into it with her_ \- has always struck me as bizarrely OOC for Corvo (I know Arkane basically put it in for questionable funsies but even so) and something I like to attempt now and then is to try to work through OOC behavior in such a way that it makes more sense. So that's part of what I'm doing. 
> 
> It also makes a lot of sense to me that a post-Medium Chaos Corvo would be feeling utterly lost and out of place and wrestling with the things he had to do and desperate to connect with anyone who had even the vaguest idea of what he went through. Callista is kind of an obvious choice for that. 
> 
> Fic title and mood inspiration is from ["Don't Swallow the Cap" by The National.](https://youtube.com/watch?v=bFnA-8H-5lo)
> 
> As always, thanks so much for reading and would love to know what you think. ❤️

_Under other circumstances, I might welcome your… advances._

Except that’s not what it was.

Was it? He wasn't sure—not then, not later, not ever. He pulled back and turned hastily away, whirled and yanked the door shut so hard it rattled the frame and his face was burning, and he couldn't recall another time when he'd blushed. _Blushing_ might not have even been the right word for it; it was beyond embarrassment. It eluded language. He stumbled back up to the attic and sank down onto the bed, listened to Piero clanking around on the upper floor of his workshop, the raucous cries of the gulls over the river, the faint monotonous growl of the street speaker. All those sounds melted together and he bent over his knees and covered his face with his hands.

It wasn't the first time he felt certain he was losing his mind.

From out of the reddish darkness behind his closed lids, he could have sworn he glimpsed amused black eyes glittering back at him.

Once years ago in Karnaca in a strange and brash and occasionally foolish youth he might have done something like that. Probably not of his own volition but on a dare—a bet that he wouldn't summon up the courage. Crawl up to the balcony of one of the girls he liked, sneak through her window and into her bathroom when he heard the water sloshing in the tub, burst through the door and then flee before her shocked screams could summon her brother or father or anyone else who might be inclined to repay him for his disrespect by breaking a few of his bones. He's virtually certain that he never pulled that specific prank, but he was more than capable of it. But that was then. Everything that could possibly change has changed.

Everything that could possibly change has changed again.

He raised his head and stared at the splintered floorboards. The threadbare rug someone set down by the cot. Cecelia’s attempt to dress the place up for someone who had lived over half his life in the company of royalty? Perhaps. She was a sweet girl, in her way, and it was the kind of thing she would do.

The things he thinks of in order to avoid thinking of Callista’s flat, tightly controlled expression and the equally tight control in her voice. Trying not to show alarm. Trying not to show—stars fucking help him—fear.

Did he actually frighten her? Was it that bad?

What in all the fucking spheres _possessed_ him?

_I haven't been myself lately._

Those amused black eyes. He doesn't need to cover his face to see them now. _Haven't you? Are you certain of that?_

_Who are you, Corvo? Who are you really?_

Then, in the days after, he found out.

~

He didn't expect to find her here.

He didn't expect to find anyone. The ones who survived were supposed to be long gone, the ones who didn't survive have been taken away, and the Hound Pits Pub stands dark and silent, Piero’s workshop and Emily’s tower equally so. What'll happen to the place now, Corvo doesn't know, and in fact he would prefer to be uninvolved. Havelock had no surviving family, at least none in a position to inherit. Who it belongs to now is unclear, and he doesn't care.

There are unpleasant stains in the dirt. Bloodstains should have stopped troubling him a long time ago, for all he tried to avoid spilling blood to stain, but these do.

Yet here he is.

It's near dusk. The sun is low over the river, the water shimmering ruddy gold. The city behind and beyond is quiet. The Plague isn't yet contained, but everyone seems to have settled into the belief that soon it will be, and Dunwall is gradually calming. That calm itself might do as much to assist in a cure as anything Sokolov is refining.

Dunwall’s sickness was always deeper than anything one could find in the blood.

Can blood wash out blood? Can sufficient blood ever make anything clean? Was it not so much a question of _too much?_ Is it possible that he didn't spill enough of it?

He still doesn’t know.

He's very tired.

He lingers in the shadows at the base of the tower, looking at her. She's standing on the ruined terrace overlooking the river, her hands resting on the low, broken wall that runs around it. Like this, she's little more than a dark gray silhouette against the water and the setting sun, the edges of her form faintly gilded. And it hits him hard and suddenly, looking at her this way, that from behind with her face invisible to him the resemblance to Jessamine is uncanny. In full light there's no resemblance at all—the sharper angles of her face, the tawny brown of her hair, and she's not so tall as Jessamine was, nor is there the subtle wiry strength in her frame.

But now there's something about the way her shoulders are loose and slightly set back, her face tipped up, her hair coiled at the top of her head. The terrace. The river. This tower is not his Tower and this terrace is not the terrace overlooking the water lock, and the river is so much nearer, almost close enough to reach out a hand and skim his fingertips across the water.

Something in him twists sharply and he has to look away. Density of the past like a descending hand—pressing down on him, lead in his lungs, and the weight of the Heart nestled close to his chest.

Every second since it was placed into his hands, he has been terrified of dishonoring her.

He should go. Whether he came here to say some kind of farewell, close some book or brick up some doorway, he honestly doesn't know, and in any case it doesn't matter. Behind the walls of Dunwall Tower is light and home and Emily, and what safety he's been able to piece together in two short weeks, and those are the things he should want. With them is where he should belong.

He should go. He’s not moving. His gaze has found the yard. The bloodstains are invisible behind the workshop, but his imagination can do the bulk of the work for him. He liked Lydia, to the extent that he was capable of liking people in those terrible days. He wasn't so fond of Wallace. But stars, neither of them deserved what happened to them.

If he had seen before it was too late. If he had realized what he should have known the entire time.

He's come to despise the word _if._ It follows him around like yet another ghost.

He should go. He turns. And some part of him must have abandoned any pretense of stealth, because his boot scuffs against the crumbled stone and his arm brushes the dry ivy and makes it rustle, and he glances back in time to see her stiffen.

He freezes. Waits. Out of the shadows her low voice comes to him.

“You always made me uneasy, watching us all that way.”

He clears his throat. He can be silent as a literal shade when he wants to be, but he's still capable of clumsiness, and now he feels extraordinarily clumsy, his body too big for itself, his otherwise deft hands hanging like clubs at his sides. He occupies too much of the world.

The Outsider never gave him that gift: To diminish and fade. To become nothing. So many times, he would have welcomed it.

“I'm sorry.”

“Don't be. I never blamed you.” At last she turns, leans back against the wall. “I knew you didn't mean any harm by it. It was just your way.” He can't see the edge of her smile, but he can hear it. “Apparently it still is.”

Glancing over his shoulder, he steps fully into what light there is. “I thought maybe you wanted to be alone.”

Callista crosses her arms. “Why are you here?”

He gives her a half shrug. “I'm not sure.”

“I see.” She tilts her head, and somewhat to his surprise, she releases a quiet laugh. “Honestly, neither am I. You said you thought I wanted to be alone… But I don't even know what I want.”

He hesitates for another moment—then, because he can't think of any solid reason not to and because maintaining that much distance from her feels wrong somehow, he goes to her, stops beside her, bends and rests his elbows on the stone and stares out over the water.

Kingsparrow Island is just visible through the falling light.

“I've been thinking about having it demolished,” he murmurs.

In the periphery of his vision, he sees her turn her head to look at him. “Having what demolished?”

He gestures. With his left hand; he's started wrapping leather bands around it, covering the Mark, but he can't escape the feeling that it's somehow burning through. Visible even when it doesn't glow blue-white with the Void’s power.

“Oh,” she says. “The whole thing?”

“We've dismantled most of the Fort. Had to, half of it was in ruins anyway. But the Lighthouse is still there, and it's…” He trails off, shakes his head.

“It's hard to look at,” she finishes. She breathes another laugh. “It’s all hard to look at now.”

Unspoken: The very spot on which they're standing.

And yet here they both are.

“I never thought,” he says slowly, “that one of the hardest things would be deciding what to rebuild.”

“You'll do it right,” she says, her voice soft. He glances at her again; her head has dropped between her shoulders, tendrils of loose hair around her face, and he doesn't know when he last saw her look so weary.

Except perhaps he's been seeing it all this time, every day—well-concealed but deeply felt. She’s come out of the bloody interregnum with more of her life intact than many have, and in fact on paper she's gained a good deal: she has her uncle, a place and a position, and a future at least somewhat secure, provided she wants to keep it that way. But she’s governess to a young Empress whose reign is still an immensely unknown quantity, and in a sense she's on the front lines of a new and far more grinding kind of war. It's always easier to tear down than it is to build up, and the truth that Callista is perfectly wise enough to know, the truth that robs Corvo of much-needed sleep and sends him pacing the dark corridors and flitting like a bird across the city rooftops, is that not a single one of them has any genuine notion of how to make this work.

Of course she's weary. How else is she supposed to feel?

“You can't know that.”

“You will,” she repeats, and if he hears weariness, what he doesn't hear is doubt. “Or you'll get it as right as anyone can. Because you want to. Because you care.”

He barks laughter—louder and harsher than he meant it to be, and for an instant he's worried she'll interpret it as scorn. But when he looks at her, he sees no sign that she's taken it for anything of the kind.

But the harshness hasn't left him.

“If caring meant a single fucking thing, she would be alive now.”

The words are cold, and clipped at the ends as if he took his sword to them. He hears Callista’s light gasp and grits his teeth, and wonders if everything about the last hour—from leaving the Tower to speaking to her—was a mistake.

_I haven't been myself lately._

Does he even remember what _myself_ felt like? Did it ever really exist? Or was it, like so many other things, a dream from which he was awakened in the most brutal way?

He doesn't know what he's expecting her to say. In truth he's half expecting her to mutter a goodbye and leave him to soak in his own self-pity—and properly so. He's poor company these days. Not that he was especially agreeable company to begin with.

But she doesn't move—except to face him, her arms still loosely crossed.

“Everyone always said you loved her.”

He lets out a long breath and closes his eyes, and folds his hands against his mouth almost as if in one of the prayers he hasn't said since he was a boy.

If she wants a confession, let that serve.

She makes a quiet noise that sounds like affirmation. “I never believed you killed her, you know. It wasn't even when Havelock said you were innocent. It was long before that. Then when I saw you I was sure.” Her voice drops. “When I saw you with Emily I was even more certain.”

He opens his eyes. They're stinging. The urge to Blink up to the ledge above them and away into the accepting dark is almost more than he can fight.

“She's your daughter.”

He whirls. He doesn't mean to turn _on_ her, doesn't mean to intimidate, but she takes a step back all the same, although she doesn't uncross her arms. But there's an apprehensive flash in her eyes that he hates to see, and again he thinks of her in the bath, staring at him, the fear that he couldn't convince himself wasn't there.

When he was only the Royal Protector, he knew how to make the right people afraid of him. At the very least he could reliably make them nervous. But that was before he was accused of murdering an Empress, and even though he's technically been exonerated he knows not everyone fully believes in his innocence, and even the ones who do look at him now…

He killed people. Many of them. He tried not to, he tried so many times to stay his sword and his crossbow and his pistol, and sometimes he succeeded—and then other times he had no choice. And then there were the times when he failed to hold back the bloodlust because it felt so much better to give in.

He's constantly astonished by the fact that he let Daud go. Daud, above all the others.

Corvo Attano left a trail of dead on his way back to Dunwall Tower and the throne. The entire city knows it. They whisper. They look at him and they're afraid.

Outsider’s black fucking eyes, this is a fear he doesn't think he can bear.

He looks away. “I'm sorry,” he says again, and it sounds utterly hollow.

“My Lord,” she murmurs. “Corvo.” Ludicrously, insanely, light pressure on his forearm; he stares down at it, her small pale hand against the heavy black of his sleeve, and can't quite make sense of its presence.

If she's afraid of him, she's not letting it stop her.

“She is,” he breathes. “She's mine.”

Callista nods, withdraws her hand. “I saw that too.” Half smile, a touch of melancholy in it. “It's not as if you hid it. It's not as if you tried. When you came in that night after you were done with—what you were doing.” Was that one of those times he came in with blood on his hands and coat? Was that one of the times when _what he was doing_ was abundantly clear to anyone who caught a glimpse of him? He honestly can't recall. “How you looked at her. Then, but always. Now. Even if she wasn't your blood, she would be your daughter.”

Later, the whole thing will strike him as strange and entirely dreamlike, that they've spent so long in relatively close quarters—in the Hound Pits and now in Dunwall Tower—without ever really speaking this way. It'll strike him as additionally strange that they had to come back to this place to do so—that it’s only now, as they stand in the deepening shadows of what they can't seem to fully escape, that something is breaking open between them.

For a few seconds more, she doesn't shift her gaze from him. Then she does, turns back to the river, and her arms don't appear so much crossed over her chest as wrapped around her middle. As if the breeze coming off the water is chilling her. As if she feels the need to protect herself.

As if she's hurting.

“I don't ever want to come back here.” She exhales and swallows, and when she speaks again there's a new ferocity in the words. “I wish you _would_ tear it all down. Start with the Lighthouse, but don't stop there. Raze it to the damn ground.”

He merely listens, briefly speechless. He's heard her annoyance, her frustration—primarily with Emily, and always trying to restrain it. He's heard her repressed anxiety—her default in the majority of the time he's known her. The tense firmness with which she put off Piero’s approaches. The cautious but genuine pleading in her voice when she asked him to spare her uncle. The quiet gratitude when he did. All through this mad eddy of days, he's heard so many emotions in her, but he's never heard anything like this.

She's still restrained, but it's cracking at the edges. Something wild and far too much like hopelessness is churning beneath her surface, and he thinks of icy currents racing along the bottom of the Wrenhaven, invisible but powerful enough to reshape the river’s course given adequate time.

She says she wants to never come back here. Staying isn't doing either of them any good.

He closes his Marked hand into a fist and flexes his will, loosens into the flare of blue-white burning ice. If only it could loosen the rest of him. “We should go.” He pauses. “How did you get here?”

“Carriage. It's gone now.”

“I'll send for another one.”

Once more hears the faint and faintly sad smile in her voice. “Not that you need one.”

Another thing he's never spoken to her about. She's never asked. But of course she knows that for him the laws of time and space are frequently optional.

So there's not much point in denying it. But now that he's here, now that he's made himself known and they've said what they've said, he's not so inclined toward the prospect of seeing her into a carriage and fading alone into the oncoming night as he might have been before he spoke to her at all.

“I'll come with you,” he says. “Unless you'd rather I didn't.”

She pushes herself away from the wall as if it requires some effort—as if she's fighting some invisible pull. But when she faces him and the dim glow of a streetlamp catches her, she appears as she always does. Calm, composed, serious. No sign of the desperation of barely moments before.

“I'd like you to come.”

He ducks his head—vaguely like a small bow. In the hierarchy of the Imperial Court, a man with a title and not one but two roles in the Cabinet would naturally far outrank a governess, but observance of that hierarchy never sat comfortably with him, and between the two of them now it seems entirely inappropriate.

He thinks about it as they walk in silence to the street. He fills his own internal silence with it as the carriage bumps and rattles through the quiet city. The silence of the Tower’s corridors, her soft step and his even softer one. The silence as they reach her room and she gives him one final ghost of a smile before she slips inside and shuts the door. He thinks about it in the silence of standing there and gazing at the space she occupied, and he thinks about it as he goes to Emily and bends over her bed and presses a kiss to her drowsy brow, and he thinks about it as he makes his shadowy way to his own rooms and the bed in which he'll likely get very little sleep. He thinks about it as he stares into the fire and draws the Heart from the fold of his coat and holds it in his cupped hands, runs his thumbs over the tiny glass window that frames those ever-turning gears.

_My love, _she whispers at the pressure of his fingers. _My love, after everything, good and bad, you should be able to rest. It pains me to see you so troubled._

_I want so much for you to be yourself again. But that is no longer possible._

_I treasure you. I believe that you did the best you could. Yet you are not who you were._

He closes his eyes and thinks about Callista’s sad smile, about the pub, the tower, the bloodstained yard, how he and she share that place and what happened there. In some ways, they share it as no one else does or can.

If only he believed that they could ever truly leave it behind.


	2. do not know what all the troubles are for

There have been more of these days lately.

The days like this one, where Corvo rounds a corner and Emily slams straight into him, nearly knocking him off-balance, and before he has time to recover and focus she’s wrapping her arms around his waist and crying into his coat.

A parent learns the fine distinctions in the weeping of their child, because there are many. Some of the acquisition of this particular language is borne of necessity, because an infant has few alternative ways of communicating what it wants. But it’s also sheer familiarity. It’s a thing you can’t _not_ know, if you’re the kind of father who pays attention.

Corvo pays very close attention to everything.

This crying is an explosion of outrage and frustration, which he confirms when he gently pushes her back to see her face. Flushed, tear-streaked, her mouth pulled into a grimace and her eyes screwed up with fury. Her hair ribbon is sitting askew. She glares up at him, still crying, and he can instantly discern the twin impulses to argue with him and seek his sympathy. She merely hasn’t yet decided which she’s going to go with.

He drops into a crouch, bringing them eye to eye, and rubs his thumb across her cheek, wiping away the tears. Not that she doesn’t immediately produce more. “What happened?”

Emily’s mouth trembles and she glances behind her as if she’s expecting to be pursued. “I’m not going to do it anymore. I’m _not_.”

Inwardly, he sighs. He has a strong suspicion as to what this is about. It’s not remotely the first time. “You’re not going to do what, Emily?”

“I’m not going to study those stupid history books anymore.” She sniffles and wipes her runny nose on her sleeve. “I don’t care about the War of the Four Crowns or the Morley Insurrection. I don’t care about who signed what treaty or who succeeded who on the throne. I don’t give a _fuck_ about any of that.” She halts and apprehension flickers in her eyes; her language has been more decorated with profanity than it ever was before Burrows’s coup, and while Corvo is sure some of that is merely her spending so much time in proximity to things a ten-year-old girl should never see or hear, he’s positive that’s not all of it. That’s not the entire reason she’s doing it now.

A confused, scared, wounded little girl lashes out with whatever she has.

He hasn’t ever punished her for it. He despises disciplining her, especially now that he’s essentially the only one here to do it. The most he’s done is speak sternly to her about the language a young sovereign should use, but ever since they returned to Dunwall Tower and the process of recovering a kind of normalcy began, he’s noted that she’s more upset by his sternness than she was even as a much smaller child. In his opinion it isn’t fair to call it _overreacting_, but she reacts more strongly than she once did.

On the worst nights he’s tormented by the thought that she might, on some level, be fully aware of the things he did. That she’s now afraid of him too.

In any case he lets it slide for the moment. She’s upset enough already and he doesn’t see what pushing it would accomplish.

“Come on.” He straightens up and offers her his hand. She looks dubiously at it and wipes her nose again, but she isn’t putting up any signs of further resistance and that’s encouraging. A bit. “Let’s go for a walk.”

She takes his hand and allows him to lead her through the corridors to his chambers, and by the time they step through the glass doors she seems calmer. They’ve entered the drawing room, and he presses her down onto the windowseat near the piano and goes to the small wet bar by the fireplace. Some of what he keeps stocked is alcoholic—strong and well-aged brandies, a few different varieties of whiskey, Tyvian red from several of what are widely regarded as the better years. But there are other things more appropriate to a child, and he pours her a glass of pear soda and brings it over to her.

The bar is another thing that’s changed. It’s better stocked than it used to be, and he’s having to replenish it more often than he did. Sometimes a drink helps him sleep.

Sometimes he needs more than one.

He hands her the glass. She takes it with a resentful glance but sips it, and he sits down beside her and studies her while she very pointedly doesn’t look at him.

For the most part Jessamine was over her propensity toward childish rages by the time he met her. She was on the cusp of adolescence, and her moods tended toward greater darkness and depth. But she must once have gone through this phase—sullenness and obstinacy. Although likely less severe.

He looks at his daughter now, the way she’s grudgingly drinking her soda as the gray light from the window shines over her mussed hair, and what he sees hurts so much he nearly has to turn his eyes away.

Instead he reaches out and smooths her hair back, and she doesn’t recoil. That’s good. They might genuinely be on their way out of the cloud.

“You have to study,” he says patiently. “I know you don’t want to, I know you hate it. But it’s something you have to do.”

“I’m the Empress,” Emily mutters. “I shouldn’t have to do anything I don’t want to do.”

Corvo lets out a hard breath. On its face this is somewhat difficult logic to argue with. Many adult nobles have taken that approach; he’s known plenty of them. He personally disposed of three, and the fact that he managed to avoid killing one out of those three hasn’t helped it to sit any easier with him—and not merely because he doubts that the man he gave her to meant well, for all his professions of love.

“Empresses have to do lots of things they don’t want to do.” He pauses. “You remember your mother, she was always putting up with work she hated. She had to talk to people she didn’t like and she had to be nice to them. She had to talk to people she didn’t _trust_ and she had to be nice to them.”

Emily shoots him a scowl. “Why?”

“Because that’s what Empresses have to do,” he says, still patient but unable to keep the weariness from creeping into his voice. Honestly, now that he’s talking through it, the whole notion strikes him as unfair. “Being an Empress isn’t all ships and soldiers and ordering people around. It’s hard work. Unless you’re a bad Empress. You don’t want to be a bad Empress, do you?”

“I guess not.” She heaves a sigh. “I just don’t understand why I have to know all those things. Names and dates and people who’ve been dead forever, why does it _matter?_”

“That’s not a bad question,” he murmurs, and sits back. He’s continued to stroke her hair in absent sweeps of his fingers, and he can feel her unbending slightly as he does. “That’s a very smart question, actually.”

“So what’s the answer?”

“I think...” He pulls in a breath, his attention wandering over the intricate woodwork of the ceiling. “Take Anton and Piero. They can do some amazing things, can’t they? They’re stopping the plague. They’re making people better.”

Emily rolls a shoulder. “Yeah.”

“Do you think they woke up one morning knowing how to do all that?”

“No,” Emily says immediately. “They went to the Academy. They were there for years and years.”

“That’s right. Years and years. All that time, they were studying, and they were learning from other people who knew about everything all the other natural philosophers had learned. They couldn’t have done the things they do unless they knew where to start.” He returns his eyes to her. “Do you see what I’m saying?”

Emily frowns at him. “Not really?”

“We can’t understand right now unless we understand before. Everything comes from somewhere. Everything happens because something else happened first. And something happened before that. Something else happened before that. And an Empress—a good one, a strong one—has to understand many more things than most people do.” He gestures to the map on the wall, each great city of the Isles marked by a gem. “You’re not just in charge of the Empire. You’re responsible for it. You can’t take care of something you don’t understand.”

_Responsible for an Empire_. His heart clenches in his chest. 

No one should ever say something like that to a child.

Emily is silent for a time, appearing intently focused on the last of her soda. She turns the glass between her hands, watching the tiny bubbles drift up the sides, and when she speaks next it’s almost too low for him to hear.

“Why couldn’t you save Mommy?”

He gasps. He can’t help it. He gasps and instantly his chest locks up in a miserable combination of dread and mortification. She hasn’t ever asked him this question, not directly, but he’s known all this time that there’s no way she wasn’t asking it in silence. There’s no way it hasn’t troubled her. For her entire childhood he was there, and he was strong and solid and even perhaps omnipotent in the way fathers can be. He was the Protector. She knew him in that role every bit as much as she ever knew him as a father. His very existence was built on that bedrock. He Protected. She was told over and over that he was the one who kept them safe.

Until he didn’t.

Haltingly, pathetically, he forces out the words. “The man who...” _Who killed her_. “Who was there that day, he could use magic. If he couldn’t have done that, I would’ve been able to stop him.”

_Would you?_

“You can use magic too.”

“I couldn’t then. You know that. That part happened later, after I got out of prison.”

“Why didn’t it happen before?”

He releases a heavy breath and swipes a hand down his face. He’s wondered that. He’s wondered that more than once. _You black-eyed bastard, where were you? Where were you when it truly mattered, when it might have made all the difference?_

Of course he does comprehend the Outsider’s brutal logic. He wasn’t _interesting_ until he lost everything. 

“I don’t know. It just didn’t.”

“What if...” She pauses and swallows, seems to pull something together, and starts again. “What if a man like that came back? What if someone tried to kill us that way again?”

Daud. Daud is never coming back. Of that much, he’s certain. Even if he was stupid and suicidal enough to do so, Corvo is additionally certain that he wouldn’t pose a threat. The misery and ruin in his eyes had been genuine.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t more out there like him.

“I have magic now,” he says quietly. He flexes his hand; beneath the leather bands the Mark burns and sends power as cold as the Void rushing through his veins. “Everything is different. I’d stop them.”

Emily doesn’t respond. After a few moments he realizes that he’s _waiting_ for a response, poised, barely breathing. Needing to hear it. Needing so desperately for her to tell him that she believes him, that she has faith in him, that he’s right and no one who comes at them could ever be a match for him.

But she says none of that. Instead she leans against him, her head tipped down and the glass held loosely in her lap, and his stomach wrenches and his teeth close on his lip as he circles his arm around her.

“I love you, Corvo,” she says softly. And ordinarily those three words would beam joy into his core, send sunlight racing all through him, fill him up so full with happiness that he aches.

But now she sounds so sad.

“I love you, sweetheart,” he whispers, and he feels faintly sick.

He’ll protect her. No matter what happens, he will. The Empire could burn and crumble to ash around them, the Great Ocean turn to blood and the stars themselves fall, and in the midst of the end of all things he would wield his witchcraft and his sword and keep her safe from every harm.

He won’t fail her again.

~

Callista is picking up the scattered books when he enters the schoolroom.

He surveys the wreckage, a lead weight settling against his diaphragm; the tantrum was worse than he thought. Emily didn’t merely throw a few history books—nothing worse than she’s done before. She appears to have emptied an entire shelf onto the floor, hurled more than a few the full length of the room. The globe is overturned. Near the desk, broken into three pieces, is her slate.

The schoolroom was once Jessamine’s office. He supposes that it’ll serve that sole purpose again, once Emily is old enough to make use of one of those. In the meantime perhaps it’s easier to see it remade in this image; one less familiar thing to tear at his edges. One less ghost in the Tower.

Although nothing is easy about this.

Callista starts when he makes a quiet noise to announce his presence, straightens up so hurriedly she drops one of the books. “Lord Corvo.” She looks around and offers him a weak smile. “I’m sorry about the mess. Her afternoon lesson—”

“It didn’t go well. I know.” He bends to pick up the volume nearest his boot; not a history book but an introductory text to native Serkonan fauna. “She ran into me. We talked about it.”

“Oh.” Callista glances down at the armload she’s keeping tenuous hold of. “I expect she told you what the problem was, then?”

“She said she didn’t want to study history anymore.” He offers her a sympathetic smile of his own. “I don’t blame her. When I was a boy I never went to anything anyone would properly call a _school, _but if I had, I can’t see that being anything like my favorite subject.”

“Well, I don’t especially enjoy teaching it.” Callista walks over to the desk, stepping gingerly over more books as she goes, and lays down the pile, attempting to arrange it into a less precarious stack. She glances back and nods at the book in Corvo’s hands. “She doesn’t hate biology quite as much. If only I could focus on that and forget everything else.”

Corvo grunts, dimly amused, and picks up a few more. A couple of the spines have cracked. Pages folded over and a few torn. He flattens them out as best he can, and he’s about to ask Callista if there’s anything she thinks he might be able to do to improve matters when something about the way she’s standing and gazing down at the book in her hands pulls him up short.

“Did she only say it was history?” She looks up, her brow furrowed. “Or did she say which specific history it was that set her off?”

Corvo shakes his head. He moves toward her, regarding her more closely; something dark and worried is flitting behind her eyes like a moth. “She just said she hated all the names and the dates. Said she didn’t get why any of it mattered.”

Callista sighs and ducks her head, holds out the book. Corvo shifts the ones he’s carrying under his arm and takes it, peering down at the title.

_The Early Reign of Jessamine Kaldwin the First._

“I thought maybe it would interest her more than the others.” Callista’s voice is vaguely strained. Guilt? Possibly. “Given that it’s closer to her. And Empress Jessamine’s early years were very interesting. I was assuming she might not know all of it.” She pauses, gnawing at her lower lip, her hands working anxiously at each other. “I was thinking...”

His voice is carefully even. “Yes?”

“I was thinking that maybe if you were part of it, she’d want to know about it.”

He nods silently, returning his attention to the book. He opens it, thumbs through it without reading, the words indistinct black streaks across the page. In fact it’s not a ridiculous thought; Emily spoke disparagingly of _names and dates_ as knowledge distant from her, unconnected to her, unrelated to anything of importance to her. The presence of her mother and father in the story might change that.

But now he also sees what triggered her rage.

It wasn’t merely rage.

“Instead it only... upset her.” Callista releases a breath and turns away, shuffling the books aimlessly. Something fierce in the movements of her hands; she’s exasperated, and Corvo would be willing to bet that it’s with herself more than Emily. “I should’ve known it might. I should’ve known it was a bad idea.”

“It wasn’t a bad idea.” He slides the book back onto the shelf and goes to the globe, tipping it upright. Aside from having been on its side, it looks none the worse for wear. Perhaps a dent or two near Baleton, a scratch marring the eastern Serkonan coast. “I think it was a good idea. It just didn’t pan out like you wanted.”

She barks a laugh. “No, it definitely didn’t do that.”

“I know you’re doing the best you can. She’s been through a lot.” He rolls his eyes inwardly; _understatement of the decade_. “We’re all learning how to be normal again. It’s going to be difficult.”

“You think we can learn how to be normal?” She turns back to him, her hands working at each other again. He glances down at them and is mildly surprised by the sudden urgent impulse to take them in his and make them be still. “You think we can ever do that?”

The Mark. Its subtle burn. He loves what it gives him, he can’t deny that. He loves the power, the way he can toy with time, cut through space like his body is a blade in and of itself, pour his essence into the mind of another and use them like a puppet. Leap like a cat and run like a gazelle and do both as soundlessly as a shadow. He’s not a god, but he’s closer to it than most men ever come. Some of the love he feels is pure and almost childlike. Some of it is far less so. Some of it he’s almost ashamed of. But beneath it all, the fact is that he never asked for any of it.

None of what he went through—what they all went through—was worth it. And now it’s a scar that will never heal.

“No,” he murmurs. “Not really.”

Callista looks down at her hands. For the moment they’ve stilled on their own. “I want to try. For her, not for me. But I just... I don’t see how it’s possible. Nothing is the same. Nothing can ever be the same.” She raises her eyes to his, and he’s not astonished to see tears shining in them, tinting the dark brown even darker. “I’m sorry, you don’t—You don’t need to hear any of this, I can finish cleaning up on my own.”

“No,” he repeats, steps over another couple of books between them, stops. She gazes up at him, eyes glistening but the tears as-yet unshed, and as he did that night at the base of the tower, he feels far larger and clumsier this close to her than he should. But he shoves it away, lays a hand on her shoulder. “It’s all right. I’ll help.” He withdraws his hand and gives her a tiny, crooked smile. “Emily’s asleep in my room. I don’t have anything else to see to.”

She doesn’t quite return the smile. But he can see that she’s trying, and she swallows and nods. “Thank you.”

“I should thank you. Like I said, I know you’re doing the best you can with her. It means...” He exhales. “The way people are in Parliament, at Court. The people trying to get close to her while they think she’s still too young to see through them. It means a lot to know someone cares about her who isn’t looking for an angle. Someone like you.”

Callista lowers her eyes, gives him another nod. He guesses he’ll have to content himself with that. And indeed she doesn’t say much else as together they pick up and put away the books, collect the pieces of Emily’s slate and toss it in the dustbin.

Of course she’s doing the best she can. As far as he’s concerned, she’s doing better than him.


	3. let’s not try to figure out everything at once

Geoff Curnow accepts the glass of whiskey from Corvo with a wry smile, and his smile is wider and wryer as he lifts it in response to Corvo’s own salute. One of the traditional Serkonan toasts is _long years and a happy farewell,_ and when Corvo offers it he releases a short, quiet laugh.

Curnow knows what Corvo did for him. If Corvo is honest with himself, part of why he let that particular secret slip was to reinforce a sense of loyalty and even obligation in the man he’s appointed head of the City Watch. But the rest of it may have merely been a much simpler need to let him know, because it’s very difficult to look at Curnow and parse his opinion of the overall state of affairs.

He hasn’t used the Heart to dig into Curnow’s mind. He tries to avoid doing that these days when it comes to the people with whom he works closely, unless the advantage of doing so is too overwhelming.

He told Curnow about the poison at the end of their first formal interview three weeks ago, watched him carefully, and he spoke an addendum into his internal silence. _You see, I did some good. It wasn’t all killing. I spared people when and where I could. Your niece said you were an honorable man and honor still means something to me._

And now when he and Curnow share a drink it’s like a private joke between the two of them. Gallows humor, but humor nonetheless.

Curnow takes a seat in the chair on the other side of Corvo’s desk and leans back, his legs crossed in a way that manages to be both casual and militarily correct. His confidence—confidence that never slips into arrogance—is one of the many things about him that Corvo finds appealing.

Corvo doesn’t make a habit of reviewing official business after hours, and certainly not in his chambers. Curnow doesn’t know it, but this is another interview, and Corvo sits opposite him and regards his own glass thoughtfully.

“The Watch officers have mostly taken well to the general amnesty you declared, my Lord.” Curnow, anticipating the question Corvo hasn’t yet asked. “I’ve identified the ones I think might still be a problem.” He reaches into the breast of his coat and withdraws a single folded sheet of paper, lays it on the desk. “I compiled a list.“ He pauses, his cool eyes shining in the evening light falling through the glass ceiling. “Let me know how you’d like me to handle it.”

There’s a flat element to those words. One might interpret it as careful neutrality, but although Curnow can be difficult to read, there are times when Corvo can infer his feelings perfectly well.

Curnow is too attentive to the chain of command to say it without being asked for his opinion, but he’d very much rather these people don’t come to any harm.

Corvo picks up the paper, unfolds it, turns on the desk lamp and scans it. Thirty-four names. He recognizes a few; he’s had the same misgivings about them. The City Watch cooperated with Burrows’s regime without any resistance to speak of, not a few of them taking advantage of _bold measures_ to indulge their greed and sadism, and as such a more ruthless Royal Protector—and Spymaster—might consider it most prudent to institute a purge followed by imprisonments for treason. But Corvo chose amnesty. _Make amends to anyone you harmed, accept disciplinary action if I decide any is warranted, swear fealty on your honor to the new Empress, and you may be relieved of any other consequences and keep your posts. This is a new day and a new Imperial age. It’s a time to make a fresh start._

One might listen to the Lord Protector’s voice, making the proclamation over the street speakers, and hear poorly suppressed fervency. A desperate need to believe what he was saying. A desperate need to say it.

No purge, at least not of the kind he might have carried out. But that doesn’t mean he can overlook people who appear to retain any significant allegiance to the Regent—stars’ sake, the man was _executed_ the day after his speedy and decisive trial, what’s the good of pledging allegiance to a fucking headless corpse—and it certainly doesn’t mean he can allow them to bear Imperial arms on the streets of the city he’s trying to to rebuild.

He deliberated. It was one of the things he lost sleep to. In the end he asked Curnow for discreet assistance and Curnow has delivered.

Now he has to decide what to do about it.

He tosses the paper back onto the desk and closes his eyes. The swallow of whiskey burns pleasantly in his chest. A little more—one or two glasses—and his nerves will begin to uncoil in earnest.

Curnow waits in respectful silence.

“Let them go,” Corvo says finally, not opening his eyes. He’s thinking of the Heart resting in a nest of blue silk in the chest at the foot of his bed. Jessamine’s solemn face pale in the darkness of his mind. “Dismiss them from service. Take their weapons. Make it known that the Navy isn’t to hire them. But leave them their pensions.” He exhales. “Their families aren’t to blame for their disloyalty.”

Curnow clears his throat. It’s a low sound, and Corvo thinks it‘s also more than a little relieved. Traveling the Isles with him, Corvo didn’t exactly get to know him with any particular intimacy, but by the end of the voyage he understood him well enough. Curnow doesn’t desire or relish violence. He gained his command under Jessamine precisely because he usually found ways to avoid it.

“I’ll see to it, sir.” 

Corvo opens his eyes and studies him, and makes no attempt to hide the fact that he’s doing so. Now for the real reason they’re both here.

“Those names, Captain.” He cocks his head. “How did you get them?”

Curnow shrugs. “Some of them I knew already. With some of them, I knew people who knew them well enough to get the necessary level of honesty. With a few of them I had to ask around a bit more _persistently, _but it was...” He shrugs again and sips his whiskey. “It was really just a question of knowing who to talk to. And how to talk.”

Corvo nods. It’s what he expected to hear. What he _hoped_ to hear. Now he’s heard it. Now he can move forward, and moving in itself is a relief.

The skillset of a Spymaster does overlap in some respects with that of a bodyguard. Ideally the two work in close consultation with each other, and Burrows was willing to do the bare minimum where that was concerned, although he neither liked nor respected Corvo and concealed his feelings poorly. Even without Burrows’s help, Corvo knew how to keep his ears open and close to the ground, how to watch everything without being seen to do so, how to be present and fade into the background.

But he’s keenly aware that he’s lacking in guile. To be sure, he’s clever, but cunning of the kind he’d need to fully inhabit this role doesn’t come naturally to him. He suspects he could acquire it, given time and study, but for now...

A Spymaster is only as good as his agents.

“Captain Curnow,” he says quietly, “I’ve been wanting to discuss something with you. In the strictest confidence.”

~

Two more glasses of whiskey did help. But their effect didn’t last.

It’s a commonly accepted stereotype in Gristol that Serkonans have a remarkable ability to hold their drink, conferred by their hot blood and their taste for intensely spiced foods. Corvo assumes that—like most stereotypes—it must have come from some minute grain of truth at one time or another, but he’s never found it accurate across the board; his impression is that Serkonans as a people don’t possess a tolerance significantly greater on average than any others. But he does—in his opinion more a trait acquired from rough living on Karnacan streets than anything else—and now he’s wishing he didn’t.

After Curnow left he took his supper alone in his chambers. He drank. He drank again. He summoned the footman and had the empty dishes taken away and ordered two fresh bottles of whiskey to be brought to him. He set them on the table and stared into their honey-gold depths as though they could give him some longed-for answer to a question he hadn’t figured out how to ask. He considered uncapping one. Decided not to. He was unsteady when he got up and carried them to the wet bar and put them away. He was unsteady when he made his way into the quiet corridors and eased through them like a shadow to Emily’s rooms.

She was sleeping when he slipped into her bedroom. Sleeping—but her brow was furrowed and she was twitching slightly, her hands worrying mindlessly at the sheets. He stood at her bedside, oddly distressed, unable to decide whether he should gently wake her or leave her be, and remembering another night, a night he’s remembered more than once because for reasons he can’t disentangle it haunts him. Returning in Samuel’s boat, weary and—bloody? He couldn’t remember before but he thinks he was. Creeping up to the tower room; Callista reading beside the bed, watching over Emily as she tossed and turned and muttered to herself. Glancing up at him when he came in, her body tense with apprehension. Begging him to be quiet, to let Emily sleep, even though she was so obviously not sleeping well.

He left without disturbing her. But she was already disturbed. He sat on his cot in the attic, his head drooping between his shoulders and his hands loose between his knees, and everything was so _wrong_ it almost nauseated him.

He didn’t know whose fault it was. Burrows, certainly. Burrows, Campbell, so many others. Too many. Blame far too diffuse to ever sufficiently punish. But they sent him out again and he went.

That part should be over. But now, weeks after it should have been put right, he gazed down at his daughter lost in her fractured sleep, and he felt so useless he wanted to scream.

He would give anything to fix it, for her. Anything at all.

But how can he fix anything when he can’t fix himself? How can he hope to repair this broken nation when he himself is broken seemingly beyond repair?

The Outsider can perceive a multitude of varying possibilities. In one of those versions of the world, Corvo Attano bends and smooths the hair of his young Empress, coaxes her out of the dreams that vex her without waking her, pulls the coverlet over her loosening shoulders and presses a soft kiss to her cheek.

In another, he stands there, staring stupidly at her as if he’s never seen her before and doesn’t comprehend what she is, and eventually turns and slinks shamefully away, leaving her to the mercy of her own troubled mind.

He went back to his chambers and poured himself a final glass of whiskey, drank it too quickly, stripped to his smallclothes and crawled heavily into bed. Burrowed into it like a rat digging through the side of a ditch.

And only slept for a few fitful hours before he jerked awake into thick darkness, flailing weakly against a ghost of a nightmare, and then gradually made himself face the miserable fact of his own sobriety.

He pulled up his knees and dropped his head against them. He thought of the Heart in her chest. Could she see him? Surely she could. Surely she can see everything. She can see him, how he’s trying but how he can’t escape the certainty that in the end he’ll only fail all over again. To be a Protector. To be a father.

_I’m so sorry, my love. I wanted to be so much better than I am._

And now he wanders.

Sooner or later he usually ends up here, like this. He thinks back to those rushing, grinding days at the Hound Pits and one of the very few things he misses is that he never struggled with sleep. He went out and did what he had to do and returned to collapse into bed and sleep like a dead man, and whatever dreams he had were stuffed into a black box and secreted away in a closet in his mind. For the briefest of times, his life was simple. He was a machine. He rested and fed and went out to fight. Kill. The extent of the complication, until that final betrayal, were the points at which he chose to spare someone. To disobey his deeper inclinations. And either way it made no difference to how he slept.

He understands now that it was a way of separating himself from himself. The sickening rush of power when he killed. The grim delight of vengeance. The exhilaration of what the Outsider burned into his flesh. He occupied himself in part only. Now he’s fully returned and it’s all complications, and even if he did what he sometimes does and steal out of Dunwall Tower and flicker across the rooftops like a blue-white flame, race silently along the eaves and leap effortlessly from balcony to balcony and lose himself in the use of his own body...

It wouldn’t be the same.

He doesn’t flicker. He doesn’t slip into a rat and creep through the vents, grasping for the elusive relief of no longer being himself. He walks as a man, dressed with his greatcoat gathered around his shoulders as if he’s preparing to leave the Tower after all. When he dressed he hadn’t thought about it, but he supposes that on some level he hadn’t completely decided what he was going to do.

It’s well past midnight. The servants are in bed. The guards are on post and patrol but they rarely come to the Tower’s inner apartments unless he summons them; the protection of this place is his affair. Pacing these silent halls, it’s too easy to slip into the morbid fantasy that he’s the sole inhabitant, the last survivor of some far worse plague, the one man not permitted to die.

Or that it’s the night he came for Burrows. That he’s done what he denied himself then and slaughtered them all. Not only Burrows but every guard, every _servant, _every single traitorous fucking one of them. It wouldn’t have been justice but fuck justice.

He didn’t give a shit about justice. Not then.

He also didn’t kill them all. He killed a couple of guards who got unavoidably in his way; everyone else lived. Even Burrows, although it was merely a short reprieve before his execution. But if he had. If he had done it, indulged in the extravagance of his desire to murder. If he had become the monster he might have been.

If he had done that, this is what he would have been left with. Alone in a maze of silent halls.

He squeezes his eyes shut and bites down so hard on the edges of his tongue that he tastes copper.

Bites harder when a body rounds a corner and collides with his.

He stumbles a little, his eyes flying open. He’s considerably larger than Callista and she stumbles more severely, one hand clenched the folds of her dressing gown, and he catches her shoulders to steady her.

She clutches the dressing gown tighter, her knuckles pressed almost as white as the fabric, and stares up at him with wide dark eyes.

“Corvo. I’m sorry.” He releases her and she steps away a bit hurriedly, brushing her loose, tangled hair away from her face. “I didn’t know anyone else was awake.”

She’s now not quite meeting his eyes. She’s skittish, vaguely furtive, and he’s not certain it’s simply that he’s startled her.

“Neither did I.” He didn’t hear her coming. She’s always been quiet, but he still should have been aware of her presence. His reflexes should have pulled him up short of bumping into her. He was very far away from himself.

That’s dangerous.

“I was—” She clears her throat. “I needed to stretch my legs, I was just on my way back to my room.”

He looks down at her and his stomach turns over. That nervousness. That his presence might discomfit her. That she might prefer to be elsewhere.

The carefully controlled anxiety in her eyes as she gazed up at him from the tub.

_I’m sorry, _he wants to say, although he doesn’t have the first notion what he’s sorry for. Himself, maybe. Instead: “Couldn’t sleep?”

She does look at him then, something uncoiling very slightly. As if he’s saved her from making an admission she was trying to avoid. She nods, and actually gives him a tiny, rueful smile.

“Usually I... can wait it out. Read or something. Tonight it wasn’t working.”

He answers her nod with one of his own. He has his coping strategies for insomnia, and tonight they seem to have abandoned him as well.

There’s no need to tell her about that part of it, not in any detail. But. “Neither could I. Had the same idea as you, I suppose.”

“Is it working?”

“Honestly?” He sighs. Why not be honest? “No. It’s not.”

The grip on her dressing gown has loosened just a touch, the blood flowing back into her knuckles. Whatever had her so wound up at first appears to be easing. Perhaps she was only startled after all. “I don’t think it’s working very well for me, either.”

“But you were going back to your room?” He lifts his chin at the corridor behind her. “I thought it was that way.”

She rolls a shoulder. The apprehension hasn’t entirely left her, and he regards himself with mingled curiosity and frustration; why is he questioning her along these lines? Why isn’t he saying goodnight and continuing with his solitary prowling?

She looks up at him, her face all at once difficult to read. She doesn’t answer. He glances down at his boots as his own awkwardness gets the better of him. “It’s none of my business. I apologize.”

“No, it’s...” She breathes a laugh. “I know. I’m transparent. I can’t not be, I never could.” She folds her arms across her middle and turns—not to leave, he doesn’t think—and the light from the half-lit chandeliers catches her oddly, cuts sharp shadows across her face. “I’m not sure why I—why I said that. It wasn’t true.” She looks at him sidelong, the corner of her mouth quirking self-deprecatingly. “Maybe I felt like I shouldn’t be out here so late. Silly thing of me to think, like my father is going to appear and shoo me back to bed.”

“You have every bit as much a right to be here as I do. Whatever the time.”

“I suppose.” She faces him again. Her lips are still curled. There’s tension in that curve. “But now I’m not sure what to do.”

Later, he won’t understand precisely what made him suggest it. He’ll worry about that, about his inability to unravel his own motivations. But he’ll stare into the dark and find himself stricken by the certainty that endless black eyes are gazing back at him with a cool, keen interest that he knows and resents and horribly misses.

A smooth cold voice he almost seems to hear.

_Don’t make this more complicated than it is. It’s not some grand mystery. You’re not a simple man, dear Corvo, but even the most complex man is driven by the same basic desires as any other._

_You were lost in the night and lonely. What more reason do you need?_

“I have a bottle of rum fresh off the boat from Cullero,” he murmurs, and offers her a small smile. He hopes it’s a friendly one. “You could come and sample it.”

She looks at him for a long time without speaking, and with every half second that passes he’s more and more certain that he’s committed some unpardonable error. Opened a door he shouldn’t have, one he ought to have known to leave closed.

But then she returns the smile. “All right.”

~

The rum is indeed fresh off the boat, and not easily come by. Thanks to his tentative alliance with Slackjaw, he has contacts at the docks who tip him off whenever notable cargo comes into port. He’s made it clear that he wants to be informed of anything unusual or rare, regardless of category, and they’ve taken him at his word.

The price of the bottle would possibly make Callista blanch. So he won’t tell her. He did pay it in full; Slackjaw does owe him a few favors but it would be rank foolishness to spend any of them on getting a discount on premium drink. Not when money is the least of his worries.

The fire that warms his combination bedroom and study also warms the drawing room, but the latter has stood unoccupied for hours and is darker, cooler, and the nights have the teeth of a chill increasing in bitterness as they approach the Month of Ice. Corvo ushers Callista in and points her toward the armchairs close to the fireplace, and goes to fetch the bottle.

This one isn’t in the drawing room, not yet. So far he’s kept it in one of the bottom drawers of his desk.

It only occurs to him just now that he might have been unconsciously concealing it. From whom, he’s not sure.

He goes to the drawing room to collect two clean glasses.

When he returns she’s taken one of the armchairs and is sitting in it a bit stiffly, looking around as if she’s not entirely comfortable in the space. Almost as if she’s never been in here—which she has, more than once, and as he sets the glasses down on the desk and pours, he watches her out of the corner of his eye, puzzled and a little perturbed.

Has he done something wrong after all?

He moves to the other chair and hands her one of the glasses. She takes it and looks at it, and only drinks when he raises his in a silent toast and sips.

It’s excellent. He doesn’t know that it’s quite worth what the market would demand for it, but it’s excellent all the same, rich and warm with spice. His eyes sink closed as that warmth flows down his throat and hums in his chest, and opens them to see Callista licking her lips, her eyes locked on the fire.

“Do you like it?”

She nods, not looking at him. “It’s stronger than I’m used to. But it’s good. You said it came from Cullero?”

“There’s a distillery there, been in operation since seventeen thirty.” He turns the glass in his hand; the rum swells against the sides, thickly fluid as hot honey. “They produce only in limited quantities.”

She takes another sip and holds it in her mouth for a few seconds before swallowing, clears her throat. She’s fully released her grip on her dressing gown and one hand settles on her chest. “It’s very... warm.”

“And yet it’s never really caught on in Tyvia. At least not that I’ve heard.”

She nods again, gazing pensively into the fire. Corvo is struck by another pang of self-consciousness; he’s never been good at small talk, he’s worse these days than he ever was, and small talk with this woman seems like a tremendously inappropriate thing to attempt.

Aren’t they past talk of that kind? Aren’t they past _small?_

He sits back and tilts his head, studying her. He knows her. There’s no need for this kind of unease. “Are you all right?”

He’s half expecting her to brush it off with an affirmative. Instead she’s quiet for a long moment, and when she speaks she draws her knees up and curls an arm around them. The wingback chair is large, and in that pose she looks oddly petite.

“I don’t know.” This time the sip is bigger. “Not being able to sleep tonight... It’s not the first night. It happens a lot.” Her mouth twists. “It happens more often than it doesn’t.”

Corvo exhales and shoots her a smile that feels distantly strained. “Would you believe me if I said it’s the same with me?”

“I would,” she says immediately. “You have a lot on your mind. And your plate. But me? I have one task. One responsibility. And I’m so tired so much of the time, you’d think it would be easy.”

He snorts. “Emily isn’t only one task. She’s fifteen or twenty all in one package.”

Callista laughs. It’s sudden and unguarded and it takes some of the strain out of Corvo’s smile. “That’s true enough, I suppose. Still.” She shifts, hugging her knees closer and resting the glass on them. “It’s hardly managing an Empire.”

_I don’t manage the Empire, _he starts to say, then halts. True, he never wanted to, never possessed anything that he imagines anyone would call ambition, and has never regarded himself as a man in whom one would vest any particularly complex set of responsibilities. But Emily doesn’t hold them yet, no matter what he told her. Not wholly. It’s not a question of wanting; she _can’t_.

“You must be exhausted,” she adds softly. “I don’t know how you handle it.”

“I don’t either,” he says, just as soft. The drink he takes isn’t a gulp, but it might be closer than it should. ”I’ve actually been talking to your uncle. I think he might be... useful when it comes to the City Watch. Reliable.”

“Really?” She flashes him a quick, pleased smile. “That’s good to hear. He’s—Like I said, he’s a trustworthy man. He won’t disappoint you.”

“I don’t believe he will, no.”

“But the others. You’re finding new people. Advisors and the like.”

He shrugs. “Some. Some served under Jessamine, it was just a question of getting them out of Coldridge and getting a decent meal into them.” Because naturally Burrows bumped off or imprisoned anyone whose loyalty he doubted, and closeness to the murdered Empress automatically made one suspect. “The others... It’s been a process.”

Callista gnaws thoughtfully at the corner of her thumb. “Are you worried about them? About choosing the wrong ones?”

It’s as if she’s broken a dam in him.

A dam which, perhaps, the rum has already cracked.

He sits forward, the glass clasped between his knees. “I worry about everything,” he murmurs, his tone flat. “Absolutely fucking everything. Are they the right people? Do they have the right motivations? Whose interests are they really putting first? When everything fell apart, where were their sympathies? Where would their sympathies be if everything fell apart again? Is their expertise real or are they just good actors?” He sucks in a breath, pushes on. The fire is eating up his vision. Suddenly he’s far too hot. “Who among the City Watch can I trust? Who among Parliament? When someone comes to Court, why are they there? What do they want? I’m always watching. I can’t _stop_ watching. And I swear, I swear to the damn _Outsider, _half the time I want to put a blade through anyone who comes within ten feet of her.”

He falls silent. Drains the rest of the glass, sets it down on the side table, lowers his head and presses his fingertips against his eyes. He’s dimly aware of Callista’s wordless attention, a gentle but perceptible weight.

Like a hand on his shoulder. 

“You feel like if it happened once,” she says, low, “it could happen again.”

His laugh is closer to a groan. “It happened twice.”

“I feel the same way.”

He raises his head, blinking as his eyes adjust to the lack of pressure. The light is weirdly bright. Her eyes are bright too, bright and weary and understanding. “You do?”

But of course she does.

“The only time I really feel like it’s safe is when she’s with me in the schoolroom,” she says quietly. “Just the two of us. All those people around her, all the... Their eyes. So many of them have these hard eyes. And _sharp,_ like something Anton would use to cut up rats.” A shudder rolls through her. “They want things _from_ her, not things _for_ her. I told you, I worked in some of the finest houses in Dunwall, so it’s not as if I don’t know how the nobles can be—but I’ve never seen anything like how it is now.”

Corvo glances at the glass. It would be good, he thinks, to get up and refill it. He pushes to his feet and goes to the desk for the bottle, brings it back and tops up her glass without being asked. Pours for himself. He pauses, then shrugs off his coat and drapes it over the chair’s back, and sinks down with a sigh like a handful of stones.

“It never has been the way it is now.” The oppressive heat is dissipating and the warmth of the rum is once more a heady comfort. “Everything was different when Jessamine was young. It was... stable. Now it’s—“

“It’s so dangerous,” Callista whispers.

“Yes. It is.”

“Once all the fighting was over... I hoped everything would be better.” The biggest swallow of rum she’s taken so far. “I was stupid.”

“You weren’t stupid.” She’s not far from him, close enough to reach over and touch, and he does—just a hand covering hers for a second or two. She looks down at it, at him, her eyes still large and bright. “It’s not stupid to hope.”

She ducks her head and says nothing else.

So for a while they sit in silence. The fire burns lower. The level of the rum in the glasses lowers as well. And he’s beginning to think they might be done, that they might be edging in the direction of goodnight and going their separate ways back to the beds that might or might not receive them, but the dam in him has broken, and as it turns out there’s a little water left to spill.

“I’m sorry about the bath.”

She halts with her glass halfway to her mouth, staring at him. Part of him seriously considers leaping into what remains of the fire. “What?”

“The bath,” he repeats. The word sounds ludicrous. _He_ sounds ludicrous. He fastens his gaze on his hands, his thumbs worrying at the rim of the glass. “When you were—When I—“

_When I behaved like some kind of drunken nobleman taking liberties with a servant._

“Oh.” She lets out a puff of air; he realizes a moment later that it’s a laugh. She waves a hand—a touch too casually. “It’s all right. To tell you the truth, I’d forgotten it.”

“It’s not all right.” Somehow he manages to scrape together the strength to look directly at her. “I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking. I _wasn’t_ thinking.”

“It was a bad time. It was a _strange_ time. I think...” She rolls a shoulder. “I don’t need an explanation.”

“I frightened you.”

She gives him a rueful smile. “I was plenty frightened those days without you doing anything.”

His hands tighten around the glass. This is more frustrating than he could ever have anticipated. Why is she letting it go this way? Why isn’t she demanding more of him? Why is she _forgiving_ him?

All the terrible things he did.

_You didn’t do all those terrible things to her, though._

“Still.” He sets down the glass. All at once he doesn’t want it anymore. “It was wrong. I don’t know why I did it, and it doesn’t matter. It was wrong.”

She doesn’t respond. And after another moment or two she rises and gathers the dressing gown around her. “I should go,” she says quietly, and smiles faintly. “I think maybe I can sleep now.”

He gets up and gives her a slight bow, follows her to the door and opens it for her. She’s about to step through, he’s about to say goodnight, when the last of the water spills and flows.

“It wasn’t an advance.”

She turns, brows raised. “What wasn’t?”

“You said...” He releases a hard breath. “I wasn’t _making advances_. It’s like I said, I don’t know what I was doing. But it wasn’t that.”

She blinks at him, seems to be working through that. That might be a flicker of skepticism he catches in her eyes. But in the end she gives him one more nod, appearing to dismiss the matter.

But she still doesn’t turn.

“It wasn’t quite right, what I said before.” The corner of her mouth lifts. As smiles go it’s now no more than a hint. “I don’t just feel like it’s safe when Emily and I are alone. I feel like it’s safe with you, too.”

She reaches out and covers his hand with hers. “Goodnight, Corvo.”

He stares after her as the outer door shuts behind her. A slender woman in a white dressing gown, fading into the shadows like a ghost.

Too many ghosts.

Eventually, he does sleep.


	4. we say tomorrow like it’s some kind of cure

A week later she comes to him in the practice yard, and once again she sees more than he’d have preferred to show her.

Some people strip down for work this intense, not only for the sake of temperature and comfort but to give their body maximum room to move freely. But Corvo has always taken the opposite approach. He almost always practices his swordwork fully dressed, even in his greatcoat, because when he’s called on to fight, ten to one he won’t have the luxury of getting comfortable. He’ll have to perform as he is, and he’ll have to perform to the absolute peak of his ability. Anything less is unacceptable.

Maybe his best isn’t always enough. But that’s no excuse to not give that much anyway.

But from time to time he does allow himself a little relief, and although the first tantalizing hints of warmer weather should be weeks away, a freak hot wind has blown up from the south and Dunwall is experiencing a bizarrely unseasonable warm spell. The sun is ruthless through a haze of humidity and the air smells faintly of ozone through the ever-present smoke. Storms are coming, unquestionably, and they’ll bring a break in the weather and a return to the chill, but in the meantime the city’s inhabitants are out in the streets, ignoring the wreckage that hasn’t yet been cleared away and the occasional transport of the final crop of ripe plague corpses, luxuriating in the lack of need for heavy coats and scarves.

There’s a kind of subtle madness in a fluke like this. People follow the lead of the weather and behave out of character. So today Corvo has removed his coat, and then eventually his jacket, his vest, and finally his shirt. Refusing to allow himself the use of his witchcraft, he works with the sword like the furious flex of his muscles can remove the clothes in and of itself, whirling and slashing and parrying as he’s beset on all sides by unseen enemies. He almost can see them, can feel the breeze of their movements on his bare skin, cooling the sweat on his temples and brow. Their faces twisted into snarls, the flash of their blades and the muzzles of their pistols. He killed so many of them but there are more, always more, and no matter what he does, sooner or later they’ll come for Emily. They’ll come for him.

He’ll have to do it all over again. And he’s learned his lesson. He won’t be able to trust anyone.

He’ll be alone.

Sharp intake of breath behind him and he whips around, ready to strike—and Callista is standing a few feet away and staring up at him with wide eyes, one hand flown up to cover her mouth. And it only takes him a few fractions of a moment to understand what’s disturbed her.

When they went to work on him in Coldridge, for reasons he was never able to discern they neglected to do much damage to his face. But they left their marks nearly everywhere else. Burns, cuts, strokes from a whip vicious enough to break the skin, and then infection dug into so many of those wounds and certified the scars that would have formed anyway, deepened and hardened them. His skin is a map of six months of suffering—and his back and shoulders are the worst.

Callista has never seen him like this. Scarcely anyone has.

He flicks the sword closed and stands there, panting, gazing silently back at her. He’s far too startled to be discomfited.

“Corvo,” she murmurs, blinks and drops her eyes. “I’m sorry, I—“

He steps past her to the bench set at the side of the practice space, to the mound of his clothes, picks up his shirt and starts to pull it briskly on. The fabric catches on his damp skin and he pulls sharply at one of the sleeves and curses under his breath when he hears a seam tear. He glances over his shoulder. “It’s fine.”

“Emily wants you,” she says quietly. “I asked her to write an essay on Serkonos, she has some questions she’d like to ask you.”

He reaches for his jacket. “I’ll be right there.”

She clears her throat, and he turns around in time to see her nod—catches the awkwardness in her expression, in her affect. “Thank you.”

She turns and leaves him without another word.

~

He answers Emily’s questions, and it’s enough to make him forget the majority of what’s been eating at him and lose himself in somewhat gauzy recollections of Karnaca—memories that smooth over the less pleasant elements and emphasize the ones that justify nostalgia. The sweetly melancholy music, the scents of spices, the massive red trunks of the cedars. The warm, gentle evenings; the window of the schoolroom is open to admit the salty wind, and out over the waterlock gulls wheel and cry, and if he closed his eyes he could almost believe he was back there.

Much later, the Tower banked down for the night, he sits by the fire and cradles the Heart in his hands, a tumbler of rum at his side, drifting off into a ridiculous fantasy. What it would be like to simply take Emily and commandeer a ship, sail away. Sail back to his homeland and start over—Emily wouldn’t have to be an Empress and he wouldn’t have to be a Protector, and together they could just be a man and his daughter. Take rooms on a quiet side street near the ocean, make the place into a home. He could find work—something simple, honest, using his hands but not a sword. They wouldn’t need much to get by, not as long as they had each other.

She could have friends her own age, who would have no idea who she was and would expect nothing from her. She could run and play with them and _be a child,_ and neither of them would have to be afraid.

He shakes his head, disgusted with himself. Stupid. Stupid and selfish; she’s a child, or she should be, but he can’t be, and fantasizing about running away from his responsibilities is a luxury he can’t afford.

_That’s not what you’re really dreaming about, though, _he seems to hear the Heart murmur, although he hasn’t tightened his hands around her. _It’s for you, but it’s far more for her. You dream of delivering her. Setting her free of this burden she was born to carry._

_Of course you long for that. Don’t you know that I did too?_

He has nothing to say.

He’s just rising and moving toward the chest at the foot of the bed when a soft knock at the door makes him start and pause. Immediately the possibilities are spinning through his mind—Emily fleeing another nightmare, guards come to warn him of an impending attack, assassins luring him in to take his head. Any number of dire scenarios.

Or merely Callista calling softly through the door.

“Corvo? Are you awake?”

For another moment he’s motionless, gazing at the door and puzzling this over. She doesn’t sound upset, not as if she’s here in response to some kind of crisis, but there’s a taut thread of anxiousness running through her voice. It’s familiar.

He lays the Heart in its chest and locks it, goes to the door and unlatches it just as Callista knocks again. He pulls it open.

She’s wearing that white dressing gown, but her hair is more disheveled than it was when he last saw her this way, as if until very recently she had been successfully sleeping. Her expression, when she looks up at him, isn’t so much anxious as it is flustered; she appears as if she might be half ready to turn on her heel and retreat.

But she stands her ground.

He clears his throat. “What is it?”

“I was just...” She pulls in a breath and pushes firmly ahead. “I was wandering again and saw a light under the door. I—I thought you might have a little of that rum left?”

The upward inflection makes it a question, and indeed there’s a flicker of hopefulness in her eyes. Even though he’s virtually certain that she’s not telling him the entire truth.

She’s not lying, not exactly. She’s simply not saying everything.

He doesn’t second-guess. The storms haven’t yet blown through, and that odd wildness hasn’t left him. Perhaps it’s in her as well, making her bold.

He pulls the door open wide and stands aside, ushers her in.

~

She takes a seat by the fire and accepts the rum easily this time, drinks without hesitation. She grunts at the burn, presses a hand against her chest, and he watches her with dim amusement.

“Take it easy. I didn’t know you liked it that much, I’d have ordered another bottle.”

Callista lets out a quick laugh that ends in a cough and lowers the glass. “I appreciate you sharing what you have.”

He waves a hand. _It’s nothing._ “Couldn’t sleep?”

She starts to nod—then stops, frowning slightly, and shakes her head. “I guess you’d say I couldn’t sleep _anymore_.”

_Ah_. “Bad dreams, then.”

She gives him a rueful smile. “You might say that.” She pauses, her gaze shifting from the rum to the low fire. “Next you’re going to ask me what they were about.”

“Not if you’d prefer I didn’t.”

“Really?” Her lips quirk. “I thought you were the new Spymaster.”

“Then one would hope I’d be a bit more subtle than that.” He doesn’t attempt to conceal the wry edge in his tone; despite the acquisition of Curnow as an agent, and a few others he considers promising, this is still not a role in which he feels a great deal of comfort. “If I actually wanted to find something out, I mean.”

_Not simply barge in through the door and stand there like a crude idiot until embarrassment makes you withdraw._

“Mm.” The sound is difficult to interpret; so is her expression. So he merely sips his own rum and waits in silence.

If she wants to tell him something, she will.

Finally she sighs and takes another swallow of rum. Her loose hair has fallen partially across her face and she pushes it back, her hand lingering at her cheek as if she feels something there.

“They were bad,” she murmurs finally, not looking at him. The fire glows in her hooded eyes. “They were bad and they’re over. That’s all that matters.”

As unobtrusively as he can, he studies her. She sounds very committed when she says those words in that way, and he doesn’t in the least believe her. And it’s very likely that she knows this, and doesn’t expect him to.

They’re not over. Nothing is over.

But he won’t press.

“Thank you,” she adds quietly. “For letting me in.”

He shrugs. “I was up.” He pauses, considering—and takes a gulp of rum and pushes on. “I was thinking about Karnaca. I was thinking about... going back there.”

“Oh?” She looks at him, brows slightly lifted. “For a visit? A holiday?”

“No.” He barks a laugh. “No, not a visit. Not a holiday. I—If you must know, I was thinking about running away.”

Her brows inch a bit higher.

“Not that I was going to,” he continues, and exhales. “It was just... Daydreams. How it would be to take Emily and sail to Karnaca and pretend we aren’t who we are. Start over. Try to be someone else. This whole ridiculous fucking mess—“ He waves a hand at the world in general. “Let some other fool run it, if they’re masochistic enough to want to.” He grunts, drains half his glass. “Stupid.”

“It’s not stupid,” Callista says softly.

Twinge of familiarity. His expression must be questioning, because she gestures at him with her glass. “I said I was stupid to hope, the first time you invited me in. You said I wasn’t. I’m telling you now, it’s not stupid to want something else for her. It’s not stupid to want something else for yourself.” She runs her thumb around the rim of the glass and sits back. “We didn’t choose any of this.”

“I did,” he murmurs.

She flicks her gaze to him, a bit sharply. “How’s that?”

He rolls a shoulder. The rum is settling into his chest like a sullen coal tumbled onto the hearth; it’s not dulling the edges of his unhappiness like it usually does. “I made choices,” he says simply. “Every time I went out there, it was a choice. Every time I put a sword or a bolt or a bullet through someone, it was a choice. It was nothing _but_ choices.”

“You also chose to not do those things, though. You didn’t kill Burrows.”

“I didn’t kill him right away,” Corvo mutters grimly. “I didn’t kill him myself. I made sure he died.” He glowers into the fire. “One way or another, I was always going to make sure he fucking died.”

“He hurt you.”

He jerks his head up, stares at her. She’s regarding him levelly, calmly, her eyes clear and direct. None of the awkward reticence he saw in the practice yard—and he has little doubt as to what she’s referring to when she says hurt you.

“You never talked about it,” she adds. “Coldridge. What... What happened to you in there. But I could guess what it was like. Everyone hears stories. And him and Campbell... They must have hated you.”

“They didn’t hate me,” he says, his voice low. “They would have had to think I was worth hating. They never did.”

She nods as if this isn’t surprising, immediately accepting the correction. “There were always those at Court who thought you didn’t have any right to be there, so close to the throne. Above your station.” She gives him a wan smile. “I told you, I’ve worked in some of the best houses in Dunwall. People talk. A lot of those people aren’t very nice.”

“That _Serkonan street rat,_” he says—an echo of a sneer—and in his own ears his laugh sounds pained. “I know. I always knew.” His eyes flutter briefly closed as a knot in his chest tightens. “I just learned to not care. I couldn’t care about them when she was with me. I had nothing to prove to anyone but her.”

“Yes,” she says softly. “And they took her away from you... and then they hurt you even worse. Because they could.” She shakes her head, sighs. “Some things we choose. Some things we don’t. I suppose all we can do is whatever we can do.”

He grunts again, and silence descends. The fire burns lower, spits annoyed bursts of sparks. After a while he gets up and feeds it and they sit in silence again. But it’s a more comfortable silence than before, and when at last she sets her empty glass aside and gets up, the subtle tension in her features has eased.

He walks her to the door, and as before he gives her a small bow. And as before, she reaches out and lays her hand over his, and vanishes into the shadows of the outer corridor.

He isn’t certain he feels better.

But he does sleep through the night.

~

It doesn’t surprise him in the least when she returns two nights later, without comment, as if she had a standing invitation.

So after that she essentially does.

Within a week she’s coming nearly every night—not quite as late, although still after the rest of the Tower has retired and only a few guards and the odd servant are wakeful. Her soft knock is unmistakable and he lets her in and pours the rum—or brandy, or whiskey, and after another two weeks of this he starts branching out, looking for more interesting fare. In the best cellars in Dunwall he considers things he hasn’t had in some time or hasn’t tried at all: apple wine from Morley in both sparkling and mulled varieties, and dry white from southern Tyvia, highly prized red blends from vineyards in the Leyenda Steppes west of Shindaerey Peak. Tequila from Cullero. Vodka from Pradym. Once during an especially bitter cold snap, a bottle of fermented mare’s milk from Wei-Ghon—which he and Callista agree is better than either of them were expecting.

Everything, he gradually notices, is a little better than he was expecting.

He still drinks every night, but far less on the whole, and no longer alone. He’s no longer seeking the dullness in his nerves; far from it. By the time Callista arrives he’s weary from the day, often deeply frustrated and sometimes faintly despairing, but when he’s sitting by the fire with her and talking about nothing in particular, often not talking much at all, and sampling whatever he’s procured for the evening, he doesn’t feel quite such a need to flee from himself.

He doesn’t always sleep through the night. But he does more often than he doesn’t. The days themselves don’t seem to press down quite so hard on him. Standing by Emily and consulting with advisors and diplomats, receiving briefings from engineers and city planners about draining the Flooded District and general repairs, interviewing potential operatives to add to a slowly growing network, conferring with Sokolov and Piero about the last flares of the Plague, suffering the petitions of simpering nobles and the neverending complaints of Parliament. Helping her with her lessons when all of that nonsense is avoidable, playing with her when he can.

And it’s _possible_ to play with her again, although there’s an edge to it that there wasn’t before. More than anything she seems to want to devote her time to fencing and fighting—and with a pang he understands that it won’t be long before she’s demanding a real sword, and he won’t be able to deny her forever.

He can’t refuse to teach her how to defend herself. It’s a thing she has to learn. Someday he won’t be there to do it for her.

Or perhaps he will be, but once again his best won’t be enough.

He gets through the days. The days take less out of him. He is, Sokolov observes one afternoon with his customary gruff amusement, looking perilously close to cheerful every now and then.

“I almost saw you _smile_ the other day,” Sokolov grunts, stepping past Corvo toward his worktable with a vial of something brown that smells absolutely appalling. Corvo neatly sidesteps and shifts upwind. “Should I be concerned?”

Corvo shrugs. The light streaming in through the generous glass panes of Sokolov’s laboratory ceiling is warm despite the chill outside; sometimes, he thinks, you see the coming thaw before you feel it. “Maybe I’m just getting used to it.”

“I’ve seen people get used to misery. It tends to not involve smiles.” Sokolov pauses and glances over his shoulder, the vial tipped against a beaker set over a low flame. “Would it have anything to do with what you asked me to acquire for you?”

Corvo shrugs again. He isn’t precisely hiding his and Callista’s nightly... meetings? Not dates. Not _liaisons, _certainly. In any case, not hiding, but neither is he eager to draw much attention to what he knows will probably look a certain way to certain people no matter the truth of the situation, and Sokolov falls very much within that category.

Anton Sokolov is likely to admit only one conceivable reason to meet a woman alone at night in one’s bedchamber.

“Fine. Be mysterious, I’d honestly expect nothing else.” Sokolov leaves the hideous substance to bubble evilly in the beaker and moves over to his desk, on which a small wooden box is sitting. He pulls out a pen knife and cuts the seal around the top, opens it and turns back to Corvo with a blue bottle in his hands.

He holds it out. “As promised. Rice wine from Meya.” He pulls it back as Corvo reaches for it, his mouth twisting into a smile. “Be _careful_ with it. It’s some of the most potent stuff in the Isles. Half this bottle would lay out a man twice your size, and when he came to his senses he’d regret everything.”

Corvo arches a brow. “How do you know I don’t want it for exactly that?”

Sokolov cackles and relinquishes it, returns to his worktable and waves Corvo out.

In the lift on the way down, watching the sun sinking over the Wrenhaven and turning the bottle over in his hands and feeling his warmth transferring to the cooler glass, Corvo’s mind returns to the question he’d dodged. Why he’d dodged it.

He’s under no illusions. He knows what most people would probably think, and he knows he wouldn’t be able to convince them otherwise.

He knows what it feels like to fall in love and he knows what it feels like to look at someone and want them in a way that aches in your bones, and he also knows what it feels like to look at someone and want them in a different way, less aching and less hopeless and with a mellower, more relaxed species of hunger. He knows adoration and he knows casual lust and a hundred things in between, and none of those are present when he thinks of Callista Curnow.

When he opened the door that day and saw her in the bath, those things weren’t present in that moment, either. He still doesn’t understand it, but he no longer feels the need to. He wasn’t himself. It was a bad time. It’s over now.

Who he intends to share this bottle with is not a lover. That’s not what he wants, and it’s not what he’s found.

He rather thinks he’s found a friend.

~

“Can I ask you a question?”

He glances up from where he’s crouched and stoking the fire. Callista’s expression is thoughtful, solemn, her back straight and her hands clasped loosely around her wine glass—Tyvian red this time, the rice wine in reserve for a night in the near future. She doesn’t appear precisely tense, but she’s also not quite relaxed, not the way she’s come to be when she’s here. She wants to ask whatever question she’s asking permission to put to him, but she’s not certain how it’ll go over.

But he can’t imagine what query would give her cause to feel that way. He rocks back on his heels, poker still in hand, and inclines his head. _Sure_.

“Empress Jessamine,” Callista says slowly, and pauses, exhales. “You loved her.”

He looks at her for a long moment. It isn’t offensive, this question, and he doesn’t consider it unfair. He’s confident that it’s not meant to hurt him. But it does feel a bit like a punch to the breastbone, and his breath is suddenly tight and shallow.

“I loved her more than my life,” he says finally, quietly. “I still do.”

_I can hold her heart in my hands. It’s not quite hers anymore, it’s not quite her, but it’s better than nothing. _ _But she should be here now. Not me._

_It should have been me._

She nods, clearly unsurprised. He gives her a pained smile.

“That can’t be what you wanted to ask me.”

She breathes a laugh. “No. No, it’s not.” Pause. “Do you think you could ever be with anyone again?”

His brow furrows. He hadn’t expected this at all and it’s perplexing. “Why?”

“I...” She sighs and looks away. “I don’t know. I was thinking again today, how nothing is the same. Nothing is going to go back to the way it was.” Her eyes drop to her hands, her glass. “I was... with someone, once. Years ago. We were to be married.”

This seems like a series of non-sequiturs. But Corvo senses some through-line, some logic in it that he can’t yet parse, and he half turns and sits fully, folding his legs. “What happened?”

She shrugs and takes a swallow of wine. “He wanted more money for us to make a start on. Make a good life right from the beginning. He took work on a whaling ship.” Yet another pause, a long one, and he already knows how this story ends. There’s really only one way it can end. “He never returned. His ship was lost at sea.”

“I’m sorry,” Corvo murmurs.

Again, a shrug. “Since then I’ve... Well. There hasn’t been anyone.” Her mouth twists. She doesn’t look sad so much as very, very tired. “It’s not that I feel I owe him something. It’s not that I think I should be in constant mourning. I know he wouldn’t want me to be alone. But it’s honestly... Do you know, the truth is that I wish I could have been with him. I wanted to go. I never wanted to be a governess, I never wanted this kind of life. I wanted to be a whaler. I wanted to be out on the water, in the open, working with my hands. Hard work, I know, but... free. But I’m—“

He nods, instantly understanding. “You’re a woman.”

“Yes.” The bitterness is cold in her eyes. “They never would have taken me. _Unsuited_ to it, the fairer sex.”

“I’ve heard stories of women who did it anyway. Bound their breasts and cut their hair, passed as boys.”

“I thought about it, before I met him. But he never would have let me. He was a good man, but he was... Well.” She sighs. “I suppose you’d say he was _traditional_. And he would have feared for my safety, even if he’d been with me.”

“That’s not unreasonable. Rough men on those ships.” He studies her, her hands and shoulders, her slender but solid build. She’s not weak. “If you still wanted to, I could pass along some orders. Tell a captain to make an exception. I could guarantee your safety.”

Her laugh is a little looser, a little warmer. “That’s kind of you. But I can’t. I’m needed here, I can’t leave Emily now. It wouldn’t feel right.”

“I don’t want you to be unhappy,” he says softly.

“I’m not.” Her laughter has faded, but her small smile is still very much there. “It’s not just that I don’t want to leave Emily. That life is over. I can’t go back to it. The woman who might have done those things, the woman who wanted to find someone to love me and be with him for the rest of my days... She isn’t me anymore. This is my life now. I don’t regret that, Corvo.”

For a while neither of them speaks. Corvo returns his attention to the fire, the dancing flames, and although it doesn’t really need it, he adds another log.

“I love him. I always will. We can’t be who we were,” Callista says at last, “but also... That person we were never entirely leaves us, does it?”

He doesn’t answer. Silence falls again, until it’s time to say goodnight.

~

A few nights later he brings out the rice wine. Which might not be his biggest mistake, but it certainly doesn’t help.


	5. I keep feeling smaller and smaller

“You know, I think she’s doing better.”

Corvo pauses, the little bottle of rice wine poised over his glass, and looks up at Callista. “Oh?”

“Yes. I mean, I thought that before, but it was just a sense of... a shift in direction. Like when you can feel the wind about to change.” She flashes him a quick smile, sipping at the last of her wine. “Do you know what I mean? Maybe I’m not making sense.”

He pours a finger of the colorless, slightly cloudy alcohol into his own glass and sits back in his chair, reaching with his other hand for the cigar he’s got smoldering gently in the ashtray at his elbow. He doesn’t customarily smoke cigars, but when he uncorked the bottle before Callista arrived, there was something about the scent of it that made him want one. 

He was right about how they’d mix, those two tastes and scents. Smooth and rough, clean and darkly rich. A counterpoint and a balance.

“You’re making sense.” He draws a mouthful of smoke, slowly blows it out in a thick gray stream. He imagines dawn fog off the river. “What makes you think she’s doing better?”

Callista shrugs. “All sorts of things. Everything. She doesn’t fight me as much—she used to do that just for the sake of doing it, I think. But she also pays more attention. She tries. Today she was able to recite the names and houses of all the Tyvian Secretaries going back three generations, which, well—”

“She couldn’t care less about that before.”

“No, and she still couldn’t. But she _did_.”

His mouth quirks. “Sooner or later you were going to break through.”

With Emily, persistence can often count for just about everything; it might sound unkind to frame it in such a way, but it’s a matter of waiting her out, wearing her down. When she entered her toddler years, and learning to say no led her directly to the willfulness she’s nevertotally lost, she would dig on on everything—purely, it seemed to him, for the sake of exerting that newfound will on the world. Bedtime, supper, baths, even something as basic as getting dressed in the morning. She would refuse, ignore pleading and cajoling and even modest threats, and in the end he and Jessamine realized that Emily had taken it into her head that her stamina could beat theirs.

They proved her wrong.

They didn’t yell. They didn’t threaten. They certainly didn’t punish her physically. They merely outlasted her. In the end she buckled and went along with whatever they wanted her to do.

Callista isn’t precisely what he’d call stubborn. But he’s seen over and over that she isn’t a woman who gives up. Not when she knows she’s in the right.

“She smiled at me when she got it. She was pleased about it. Proud of herself, even.” Callista is silent a moment, thoughtful. “I never expected her to want to satisfy me. I think I made it plain that it wasn’t about that. I know you have too. It’s about the Empire. It’s about what she’ll have to become.”

“But?” He senses a _but_ approaching.

“I’ve been hoping we might be friends,” Callista says simply. “She and I. In the way that we can be, anyway. It would be easier if we could.”

Friends. Yet again he thinks that someone else—someone more sensitive to the finer points of noble hierarchy—would balk at this notion. A governess may hold some degree of authority over her student, but she’s still a servant, and a servant is subservient to an Empress. In either direction, friendship is on its face inappropriate.

But since when has Corvo Attano ever given a shit about _appropriate?_ Since when has anyone whose opinion he might value?

Why does he keep thinking of these things? Even when he was the lover of an Empress they didn’t usually trouble him, not after the first awkward few months. Perhaps it’s because even now he’s groping at any structure he can find, any convention, any rules, even the ones he’s formerly rejected. A drowning man scrabbling at the same crumbling wall against which the waves keep crashing him.

“I think you should be. She likes you.”

Callista raises a brow. “Does she?”

“She does. She likes you a great deal. I know it’s not always obvious, but I can tell.” He gazes at the glowing end of his cigar for a moment or two. The room is receding down a kind of corridor, not in the way it sometimes did when he’d had a bit too much to drink but in a gentler, more meditative way. He passes doors, closed ones which he prefers not to open. The one he’s heading toward is already wide and awaiting him, and he feels a sweet ache when he turns to face what’s inside.

A quiet little girl reading on a windowseat in a patch of sun. She never seemed to get on with any of her governesses either. Seemed more than a little withdrawn, and until he received the letter informing him of his mother’s death, he had believed that she didn’t care a whit for him and possibly even preferred this tall, dark, and altogether strange young man from a foreign land to keep his distance.

He knows better now.

“She’s like her mother that way,” he says softly, sets the cigar back in the tray and takes a swallow of wine. It thrums warm as it pours all the way down through his chest. “In all of this... She’s very like her mother.”

She’s so much like her mother that sometimes it’s excruciating.

In terrible moments—less and less common now—he feared that part of him might begin to resent her for that, for serving as that kind of reminder. The petty horror of it, resenting his own child that way.

The terrible part of him that killed over and over and enjoyed it. 

His gaze flicks to Callista. She’s studying him with an expression he can’t quite parse. When she speaks it’s once more as if she can see his thoughts tumbling over and over each other behind his eyes.

He doesn’t like it. But dislike also doesn’t capture his feelings.

“Does it hurt you? Seeing her that way?”

He doesn’t answer immediately. Not because the answer requires thought—the pain is so close to the surface, just as it’s been for months now, pressing relentlessly against the inside of his skin. In bad moments in the past, when the darkness all around him and the lurching rhythm of the alcohol in his blood seemed to chew away at his perception and allow something nightmarish to seep in, he lay tangled in sweat-damp sheets and thought that he might look down at himself and see the outlines of hands pushing up against his chest and belly, threatening to tear through and strangle him.

Not nearly as often since these evenings with Callista began. But the memory of those times is immediate and vivid, like a dream he only just fought his way out of.

The source of the pain wasn’t solely what he sees sometimes when he looks at Emily. Not remotely. But he’d curse himself for a craven liar if he didn’t admit that it’s there.

Things are better now. _Better_ doesn’t mean _over_.

Callista must already know that. So why ask the question?

Not to stick a needle in him. Never that. That kind of casual sadism is how the Outsider might amuse himself. And while to some degree it would be fair to say that the Outsider is everywhere in that he _perceives_ everywhere, Corvo can sense nothing of that cold in this room.

He never does. Not now, when he’s with her.

His mind is wandering. The rice wine has settled into a bright little coal beneath his heart and is radiating out into his blood, setting his head to float in the light of the flames. Well, Sokolov did warn him that it would be potent.

“It hurts,” he says softly. He’s not looking at her. Not because he’s leery of what he might see on her face; he simply can’t look at anything but the fire. “It’s like... It’s like a dagger in the gut.”

He’s dimly embarrassed. An extremely plain simile, common to the point of cliche’, and it doesn’t come within leagues of describing what it is to feel that way. Callista would never expect poetry from him, but it would be good to be able to give the pain the words it deserves.

His consternation must show, because suddenly cool fingertips glide across his knuckles and he yanks his focus away from the lowering flames to see her leaning across the space between them, her hand outstretched. She’s touching him cautiously, like she might seek to touch a wild and wounded and therefore unpredictable animal.

“It’s all right.” The dancing firelight makes the arrangement of her features odd, makes her appear more like a painting than a living woman. Not one of Sokolov’s. A technique that rejects any sense of realism. “I’m sorry. We don’t have to talk about it.”

He shakes his head, glances down at her hand. The urge to cover it with his other and enclose it between his is abrupt and intense, and not understanding it, he shies away. His skull is no longer floating. Instead it feels heavier than it should, his scalp stretched tight across it.

“Don’t.” He exhales, deep enough to release some of the wine’s dense warmth. “I don’t mind.”

He does. He minds very much. But not because of her.

The clearing of his throat is a transparent affectation, a man trying to shrug something off—although he doesn’t wave her touch away. “Why did you ask?”

“I’m not sure.” She pauses. She’s tilted her head in such a way that her eyes are dipped in shadow. “Maybe I thought you wanted me to ask.”

The throat-clearing roughens and rises into a cough of a laugh and he stares at her—more bemused than anything else. “What are you talking about?”

She rolls a shoulder. As she often does when the conversation takes a turn to ground on which she’s not so confident, she twists her body to the side and draws her legs up beneath her, the milky folds of her dressing gown falling as loose drapery to the floor.

He twitches a finger, nudging it against hers. “Well?”

A few seconds of silence. She bites at her lip. He waits.

“It can take work to draw you out,” she says finally. “But there are times... times when I think you feel too penned up. When you _want_ to come out. You just don’t know quite how.” Her eyes are still shadowed but he catches the briefest glitter of low flame in them, like a scatter of sparks. “You were like that when I first met you. Only more.”

He keeps his silence. All at once it feels like something he isn’t keeping voluntarily, something which is instead keeping _him_. Without thinking he withdraws his hand and looks away from her—not entirely away. She remains in the periphery of his vision, shadowed and fire-lit, watching him as closely as she ever has. He doesn’t need to see her face clearly to feel it.

That gaze. She’s always seen so much; he knew it the instant he encountered her, while they’re speaking of first impressions—which he’s had to become skilled at forming and doing so reliably. The uncertainty in her when she rose to speak to him by the landing, and the determination to not let that uncertainty keep her from doing what she felt she had to do, but also that piercing clarity of vision.

Not unlike what he once saw in Jessamine, and not unlike when he’s seen since in Emily. The keenness that builds and strengthens like a muscle when one must maintain oneself by watching and marking everything.

An Empress and a servant. They both see more than most other people would realize, because they must.

Her eyes on him that day. Her eyes in the night-dimness of the Tower corridor, gazing up at him from the pale of her face and her dressing gown. Her eyes in the practice yard, on the evidence of his months of suffering, and how swiftly she averted them.

Her eyes staring at him from the bath as she scrambled to cover herself. Dark and alarmed—and like the rest of her, not weak.

“Tell me what you saw,” he murmurs.

He catches the furrow of her brow. “What do you mean?”

“That day. When you first met me.” He picks up the little bottle and empties the last of the rice wine into his glass without offering her more. There isn’t much left, but suddenly he wants all of it, with a desperation he can’t explain. The cigar has gone out. “What did you see?”

“Oh.”

She’s silent for a time, and the time becomes a long one, and he begins to think she won’t answer him at all—is in fact beginning to hope that she might not. The warmth of the wine is sinking through his chest to pool in his core, dense as the memory of hot lead, and the pleasant buzz is morphing into something far more complex and far less pleasant.

But she does speak then, quiet as him.

“It wasn’t the first time I saw you, when I told you about my uncle. It was just the first time I spoke to you. I saw you before. On the stairs at night, when you were on the way up to the attic. I know you didn’t see me.” She pauses, and sits utterly motionless, an odd elegance in the way she’s folded herself into the chair. “I knew who you were, of course. I’d seen you before even then. You and the Empress were at a ball the Gramonts put on—I wasn’t a guest, I just happened to pass through one of the halls on the way up to the children’s rooms. But you were there, by her side.” He turns his head in time to see the faintest edge of a very sad smile. “Like you always were.”

She falls silent again. He looks away from her, waits. The fire is burning down to coals, going the way of the cigar, but getting up to add more wood feels for some reason beyond him, as if he couldn’t trust his legs to hold him upright. He’s not drunk—he doesn’t think so. He doesn’t think being drunk feels like this, this aching heaviness all through him. His head isn’t spinning and he feels none of the familiar muted blur overtaking his perception, like a curtain of cotton wool.

If only.

Perhaps this is an effect specific to this particular drink.

He remembers that ball, that night. Jessamine wore silk the color of the orchids he recalled populated Duke Abele’s garden—a purple that seemed to glow with its own obscure light. Emily had just turned six two days before.

He hadn’t known it was possible for one man to feel so much love.

Warm all through him. Dense. Aching.

“You were different when I saw you at the Hound Pits.” She breathes a laugh. “I mean, of course you were. You were so much thinner. Your clothes were filthy, you looked exhausted. You moved...” She clasps her hands around her knee. “Like someone might move when they’re ready for someone to hit them.”

Hunched. Braced. He was ready all the time. He had to be; the blows came usually without warning when they occurred outside the times appointed for his torture.

Then he took the Mark and he learned to move so no one could touch him.

“Obviously when I spoke to you it was different, you’d slept and washed and they’d given you new clothes, but you were still... There was a darkness all around you. Something was gone from you. Something had been taken.” She draws a slow breath. “Of course I know what that thing was.”

Yes, something had been taken.

In the night, something else had been given.

“And now?”

She blinks at him. “What about now?”

“What do you see now?” Abruptly he pushes to his feet. He doesn’t waver and nothing spins, but the dimensions of the room feel wrong, off-kilter—like the reproduction of a room in the Void, manufactured only with the Outsider’s whim and will and therefore as strange as his inhuman, unknowable mind.

The floor is solid beneath him. He crouches to lay two more logs on the coals, and she says nothing, and he looks at her sidelong, rubbing the grit of seasoned wood between his fingertips. “Well?”

She swallows. She’s sitting forward now, those piercing eyes on him—and what might be a touch of that old uncertainty. She thinks he wants to hear something. She thinks she doesn’t know what it is.

Does he? _Is_ there something he wants her to say?

“You’re better,” she says finally. Very soft. “But you’re still scarred.”

He rises and exhales as he does, an enormous out-rush of air that leaves him hollowed out and hurting. His hands find the mantelpiece and he stands leaning against it, head loose between his shoulders. He doesn’t know if that’s what he wanted to hear. He doesn’t know that he wanted to hear anything.

He draws air back into his lungs and listens to the slow thud of his own heart, and thinks of her heart clutched against him, embracing the dry half-mechanical thing that’s all he has left of her.

All that isn’t Emily.

“Corvo.” She’s on her feet and coming toward him, one hand outstretched and reaching for him. He lifts his head in time to see her face, shadows all melted into a smooth living gold and dark eyes that pierce him, and all he can see is Jessamine, Jessamine in his bedchamber on a cool night with her unbound hair spilling over her shoulders and the unguarded smiles she kept only for him, and her whole self open to him and the welcome he knows is waiting there for him, no blood and no betrayal and no agonized fear on her face as she died in his arms. None of that pain, none then and none of what came later; only her.

He turns and reaches for her.

The slope of her shoulder rising to the slim, strong column of her throat. Cool under his fingers, the deeper warmth, and the stiffening of her muscles as he touches her. Curls his hand around the back of her neck, stroking his thumb over the hinge of her jaw. He’s pushing gently at the neckline of her dressing gown, pushing it along her smooth ridge of collarbone and revealing pale skin flushed with fire, the rise and dip of the tops of her breasts. She’s close enough for him to smell her, lily skin cream and rosewater, the anticipation of it sweet on his tongue. The subtle curve of her lips, parted and trembling. Her eyes.

Her eyes.

Wide and piercing, staring at him, and startled apprehension there that shoots horrified nausea through his gut like a bullet.

_Under other circumstances, I might welcome your… advances._

He claws time to a halt.

Steps back. Practically _throws_ himself back, gaping at her in the flat black-and-white the timeless world has bled into. And it’s worse, he’s only made it worse: she’s frozen in that attitude of startled alarm, one hand half raised as if to stop him, her body stiff and her lips parted in an expression he now recognizes for what it is.

He stumbles, his teeth closing hard on his tongue as his stomach twists itself into another sick wave. Everything he’s told her. Everything he’s done, everything he’s tried to do, all the ways in which he’s tried to do right. He said he was sorry for that day with the bath and she forgave him. She’s become his friend. She trusts him. She _trusted_ him.

Clearly that was a mistake. Clearly this was _all_ a mistake.

He puts half the room between them in three long strides and releases time back into its flow.

Time is in motion. But for a few seconds he isn’t, standing there with his fists clenched at his sides and the Mark searing ice in his flesh, and neither is she. She blinks, her brow furrows as confusion overtakes the apprehension, and she turns to him as her hand drops.

She freezes again. And he wonders what she’s seeing.

_A cad. A killer._ A dishonorable man who tried and wholly failed.

“Corvo,” she whispers again, and he realizes that this is the first time he’s used his witchcraft in such close proximity to her. She knows about it, yes, but there’s a world of difference between knowing a thing and watching it happen right in front of you, even if all she must have perceived was his seemingly instant transition from one place to another.

Absurdly, it feels like another thing he should apologize for. As if the magic was in and of itself yet another transgression against her. A presumption too far.

“I’m sorry.” His voice is rough, as if he’s been screaming. He looks down, looks away, anywhere but at her—_coward,_ he can’t even meet her eyes anymore. Even at a distance, the reflected image of himself, unchanged from the first time she saw him, hunched and dark and lost.

“It’s all right,” she says, but she doesn’t sound sure that it’s anything of the kind, and he grits his teeth. He wishes so desperately that she wouldn’t. He wishes she would be disgusted with him, snarl at him, curse him, fly at him and attack him and punish him for this.

Only for this?

_Is that all it is, Corvo?_

Gloom is creeping from the corners of the room and across the floor, tipping the lines and angles into greater extremes of wrongness. It’s as though he’s broken the world open and the Void is seeping through, and all at once he wants to cry out to her to run.

“Please go.”

At first he listens to the words, puzzled, until he realizes that he’s the one speaking. He’s not crying out at all and he hears no real urgency; his voice is still low and still hoarse, and bizarrely devoid of emotion.

The tough, gnarled insensitivity of scar tissue.

She hesitates, poised on the edge of something; he won’t look at her face but even now he can’t help discerning her form through the dimness, the firelight behind her and shining through the fabric of her dressing gown, the gauzy outlines of her body. The wiry length of one leg, the slight swell of her hip, her waist slender without being delicate. He sees this because he can’t not, and the bolt of fierce, painful yearning that shoots into him has at once everything and nothing to do with lust. With _want_.

He doesn’t know what the fuck he wants. 

“Please,” he breathes one more time, and she’s gone, a ghost flitting out of the room and into the Tower beyond, and the click of the door latch behind her is like a pistol shot in his ears.

For a while longer he remains where he is, staring at the last of the fire until it’s burned down nearly to the last coals, and when he closes his eyes he sees them again stained purple-green on the inside of his lids.

At last he makes his dragging way to the bed and sinks down onto it, drops his head into his hands and places all his attention and strength into the work of continuing to breathe. The thick pulse of the blood in his skull seems to transition out of him and take on direction and location, until it’s coming from his left, coming from the end of the bed.

Coming from the chest.

She saw everything, because of course she did.

“I’m sorry.”

Whisper like a scatter of dry rubbish paper down an alley. He thinks of words scrawled across crumpled pages that he can’t hope to read, red ink like slashes of blood, on the propelling wind the stench of decay and plague. He tried to save the city. He tried to save an Empire. For his daughter, for himself, for all of them, but if those things are saved now, perhaps it’s not because of him but in spite of him.

Kind woman who helped him to forget that he feels this way. The mercy of disregarding himself in favor of her. His friend. Maybe the only one he truly has. And how is she going to look at him now? What is she going to see?

_You didn’t even see _her,_ while you were reaching for her. You were seeing someone else._

She’s kind. He has no doubt that she’ll forgive him again, or at least she’ll try.

That doesn’t make it right.

He’s beginning to be very afraid—and to believe—that nothing is ever going to do that for him.  
  



	6. careful fear and dead devotion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it’s been a while since I updated this—I’m actually working on the penultimate chapter right now, I’m just also working on like fifty other things in progress. Plus, y’know, there’s a plague and everything. 
> 
> So I hope this serves as a little distraction from it, and I hope you and yours are well, and thanks so much for reading. ❤️

Jessamine’s heart beats in his hands.

He’s never understood why no one else seems able to hear her, and yet it makes all the sense in the world that her voice would be a gift and a curse meant for his ears alone, in a world where very little else makes sense at all. Now and then out of sheer mad curiosity he’s been tempted to take her and wander the halls of the Tower accosting guards and servants and demanding to know if they can hear her speak, if they can even see what he’s thrusting under their noses.

He might have wondered, when she was first given to him, whether he truly was mad. Only he knew he couldn’t be so fortunate. The world might have gone mad. He was hopelessly sane.

The only way to save it was to become as mad as it was.

He keeps her close. He keeps her only for himself. He doesn’t permit thoughts of showing her to Emily; once or twice the idea has risen out of the murky depths of him like some sickening coiled and many-toothed thing, and he turned firmly away from it and cast it back down

It’s painful enough for him alone. Emily doesn’t deserve to share in it.

Now the pain is magnified. Bright, dense, heavy and hot in the pit of his stomach. He held back for a day and most of a night and now he can’t bear it anymore: like a confessing sinner kneeling before an Overseer in the hopes of absolution, he dropped to his knees in front of the chest, unlocked it, lifted her out. Tucked her into the fold of his coat and slipped out of the Tower and Blinked onto one of the parapets above the waterlock.

He stands pressed against the edge, concrete cold and hard against his ribs and belly and hipbones even through his clothes. The wind gusts up from the crashing waves and the cold all around him seeps through the tiny holes in the fabric, through his very pores, and fills his veins. He feels sluggish, faintly nauseated, too weary to shiver. He feels ill.

A moon like a bone sickle cuts through the clouds. Its light doesn’t touch the surface of the water. No light does. He gazes down at all that impenetrable blackness and he thinks of an immense and unblinking eye, an eye the size of one of the spheres turning forever in the cosmos, impossibly ancient and blind to everything.

Perhaps the Outsider has lost interest in him. Or perhaps the black-eyed bastard is observing him now, watching him standing in the wreckage of all the choices he’s made and groping desperately for any other choice still to make.

Slowly he lifts her, presses his lips against the chilled glass that shields her spinning gears.

Squeezes.

At first there’s nothing but the low moan of the wind, the waves, the distant cry of an insomniac gull. He half-believes that she might not speak to him. That he’s somehow cut himself off from her.

But no. If cold-blooded murder couldn’t turn her away from him, surely what he’s done less than two days ago wouldn’t be enough.

_My love,_ she whispers, and he bites his lip to keep back a sob. _The pain in you is a falling stone._

When she became only a voice trapped inside a mutilated organ, her words altered as well—they took on a kind of surreal poetic quality, a rhythm and a rhyme without rhyme, a clean spareness of phrasing that spun its own elegance of itself. She had never spoken that way before, and yet he couldn’t help feeling that what he was hearing was what had always been in the deepest core of her, hidden under layer upon layer of living thought. These words unfiltered and pure. She always cut straight to—well, to the heart of things.

She says his pain is a falling stone and so it is. The notion of _pain_ is itself only an inadequate stand-in. He is heavy as a stone and he falls ever-downward. If he landed he could shatter, but he isn’t so foolish as to imagine there might be a ground or the ending it offers below him.

“The things I’ve done,” he whispers.

_I know them. I know them all. You have no need to confess them to me._

She pauses. She’s pulsing ever so gently between his palms. It has to be his imagination, but he’d swear he could see a light through that glass, a glow nestled into the gears, the source of the pulse. There must be a spark in her. She can’t be only dried muscle and clockwork.

_Who is it you believe you’ve betrayed? Is it her? Or is it me? Is it both of us?_

He squeezes his eyes shut, shakes his head. Cool tendrils plaster against his cheeks. Even at this height, the salty spray is making his hair damp and cold. “I don’t know.”

_It cannot be only her. You are distraught far beyond that. You stilled time in that moment, when you understood what you were doing. Was that all you did? Did you freeze it in place? Or did you wind it backward?_

He starts to shake his head again—stops. She said he was falling; now he feels as if he’s been blindfolded, spun around, and released to stumble toward her meaning.

“I don’t understand.”

When she speaks again, it’s with the purest, saddest patience he’s ever heard. _That day at the Hound Pits, when you opened the door and saw her. When she saw you. You did not understand then, either. I remember your confusion, and your confusion is long-lived. It has survived until now. You were killing then,_ she whispers. _You were killing, and you weren’t only killing when you had no other choice._

_Confusion, fear, and rage. My love, they are all of a piece. You will rarely find one without some measure of the other. And in the end, every time, you will also find a heart unbearably alone._

He hasn’t opened his eyes. He lowers one hand and with the one still holding her he presses her to his chest. Grips the wall, leans out over the parapet and sets his face against the cold of an expanse of endless dark water. Within that darkness, things move, immense and very old.

In those fathoms are fathomless black eyes. When they first looked at him, what did they see?

A filthy, wounded man who slaughtered his way out of prison, crawled through miles of muck and plague-dead for what he believed was safety and later proved itself a pit of vipers. Lost everything. Surrounded by strange faces and among them alone. When he reached out it was only to maim and kill. Embraced by his daughter, he was reminded more excruciatingly than ever that nothing could ever be the way it was before. Entering her room and finding her wandering in nightmares, all his presence seemed to do was make them worse. In a storm of blood and death he took back a throne, and learned that it’s simple work to destroy and a far more difficult thing to repair what’s been ruined.

Through all of it, there was a quiet woman with grave eyes who was only ever kind to him.

_It’s very easy,_ the Heart murmurs, _to forget how to reach for someone. It’s very easy to make mistakes and clumsy missteps. But you meant no harm. For once, you meant no harm. She understands that, if she understands nothing else._

_I saw you every time you meant harm, did harm. I wish I could tell you that the man who did those things was a different man. But we each have many faces. And you had your mask._

His mask, which he hasn’t worn in a long time. He doesn’t even like to touch it. His skin prickles at the thought of it. He keeps it in a case in the safe room, and he keeps the case shut and locked and the key wrapped in cloth and secure in the back of a bottom drawer in his desk, and sometimes he hopes in vain that he might forget where it is.

He knows what would happen if he ever put that mask back on. The part of himself that it would summon sleeps inside him, and its sleep is restless.

_He was you. Is you. But he is not all you must be. You can be more than him. You already are._ He feels her warming in his palm, and that warmth is somehow perceptible even through his coat. _Do you need my permission to be more? Do you need my permission to reach out? Do you need my permission to stop punishing yourself?_

“I don’t know what I need,” he breathes.

_Yes, you do. Stop hurting, my love. Or at the very least, stop hurting alone._

He waits for her to say something else. But she doesn’t, and she goes on not saying anything, and at last he understands that she’s told him everything she has to tell. He could try to massage more out of her—but he’s never had much success with that, and the few times he’s tried it and heard her gently deny him, he’s felt that he’s somehow being unkind to her.

In any case, what else could she say that might help him?

He loses track of how much longer he stands on the parapet, but when he finally turns to go back down to the terrace and the Tower and his bed for what little remains of the night, the moon has sunk most of the way below the horizon.

The ancients believed that the world was not a sphere at all but instead a flat plane, and the moon and sun were born when they rose, lived a life in a day, and in setting they died only to be born again in a cycle from which they could never escape. They could make no different choices. They could never be anything other than what they were. They were trapped in the same courses, forever chasing each other across the sky.

_We are neither suns nor moons, my love. Neither are we the cold and wandering stars._

He tenderly lays the Heart in the chest, crawls into bed and buries his face in the pillows. The grandfather clock near the desk softly chimes four and the low tone reverberates in his head, singing him toward something like sleep.

And just before he sinks below that horizon he thinks of Callista, not the ghost of Jessamine but Callista herself, the outlines of her body just visible through the fabric of her dressing gown and thin, clinging pajamas, and what he feels now isn’t lust at all.

He thinks of her and he simply wants to touch her. Lay his hands carefully on her and pull her close, wrap her in his arms and simply know that she’s real and alive and here with him. He thinks of her face, and there’s nothing of the sweeping rapture he associates with falling in love. There’s only an aching warmth like the Heart pressed against his chest.

No, that’s not right. It’s not _only_ anything. It is, in its way, as intense as anything he’s ever felt.

_And I’ve ruined it. _Once it might have been possible to brush off as not an advance. But it’s going to be far more difficult now, perhaps impossible, to ever convince her that he didn’t intend to take her to bed.

Does she feel that she’s lost something too? That he’s taken something away from her? Something she was enjoying just as much as he was? Something she needed just as much as he did?

_I’ve ruined it,_ he thinks. _I’m so sorry._ And then he thinks nothing else.


	7. I still owe money to the money I owe

He’s certain it’s not his imagination that she’s avoiding him.

It’s also not his imagination that he’s avoiding her. It is, in fact, a tricky thing to be sure of how much of the avoidance is hers and how much is his. Regardless, he’s certain that it’s happening, and it’s making him dimly miserable.

Not least because it’s not _easy_ to avoid her. It’s hard for the first few days, and it only gets more difficult. The Tower is significantly larger than any mansion in the Estate District, full of corridors and passages and side rooms, and it shouldn’t be that hard to keep from crossing paths with someone you don’t prefer to see. But it’s a different thing when that person is your daughter’s governess, and a different thing again when your daughter is highly perceptive and very capable of discerning when something is off. Somewhat out of character for her, Emily doesn’t immediately demand to know what’s wrong with him, and after a week of unspoken unease she still hasn’t done so, but it’s there every time she looks at Corvo, and every second he refuses to speak to her about it and stubbornly—and pointlessly—goes on pretending everything is normal, he feels more cowardly and more stupid.

But what is he supposed to tell her? How is he supposed to even begin to explain? And even if he could, how would it ever be possible to avoid giving her the idea that someday he might seek to replace her mother with someone new?

No matter that he could swear to her that he never will. It’s a scoff-worthy cliché, the bereft lover who will never again so much as touch anyone else much less fall in love with them, but when it comes to himself, he’s sure.

He will never love anyone else. Not the way he loved her. It simply isn’t in him.

And not merely because he loves her still.

This isn’t a choice he’s making—or at least, if he felt like it was in his power to choose some other course of action he would. But how many times in the previous months has that been the case? How many times has he been driven in one direction or another by forces that felt beyond his control, tossed around like a whaling ship beset by a storm? In how many of those times did he in fact have a choice? In how many of those times was he merely avoiding a responsibility he feared accepting?

For all the pain and destruction he caused. All the death. _I had no choice._ He knew then and knows now that so many times it was a lie.

It’s not a choice he’s making, or that’s the way it feels. Until one day nearly two weeks later he makes a different one.

~

Later he’ll conclude that it’s not so much that he finally failed to avoid her as it is that every part of him stopped trying.

What’s especially strange is that the moment comes when it should be easiest to leave her without ever having been spotted. Rounding a corner in the garden—on the way to the waterlock to speak to one of the sergeants there about patrol rotations—and seeing her crouched in front of one of the planting beds, her back to him. It’s a particularly cold day and she’s bundled into a thick wool coat a size or so too big for her, making her look even smaller. And for a reason he’ll never be certain of, he doesn’t turn or hesitate but instead approaches her, clears his throat softly when he’s a few feet away so she won’t be startled.

But she does jump the smallest bit, her moving hands halting. She doesn’t turn, but she glances over her shoulder. It’s difficult to read her expression.

“Corvo.” Her voice is low but it doesn’t waver. He thinks that might be good. “Hello.”

He gives her a nod. What else is he supposed to do? What is he supposed to say? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps leave after all.

Yet still he doesn’t. He peers down. The planting bed is empty and dead but for a thin row of evergreen shrubs, cut back by the gardeners for the icy months, the soil dusty white with frost.

“What are you doing?” He gives her a faint smile that she won’t see. She might hear it. “Won’t be anything growing for another couple of months.”

“That’s not true.” She shifts to one side so he can see, and sprouting between her hands is a small cluster of flowers, their broad petals a delicate purple veined with silver. “See?”

He does see. He’s also never seen it before. He bends and looks closer, and is less conscious than he might have expected of how near she is. “What is it?”

“Steppe iris,” she says. She sounds pleased. “From Tyvia. A friend brought it on a cargo ship this morning, in a pot.” She rolls a shoulder. “I was going to keep it inside, but he said it actually blooms better in the cold. Once the days warm up, it’ll...” She pauses, clearly thinking. “Not die. It’ll come back when the weather turns again next year.”

“Sleep,” he offers quietly.

“Yes, that’s it. Sleep.” Another pause. She’s not looking at him but he can make out her profile, the meditative and slightly tense line of her mouth, her furrowed brow. As though she’s puzzling something out.

Finally she rises and turns to him, dusting off her hands, and gazes silently up at him. His eyes flick down to her fingers as they move; the beds of her nails are outlined in rich black.

It’s all alive beneath the frost. It’s merely waiting for its time to grow.

At last something seems to break in her and she breathes a rueful laugh, shakes her head. “Corvo... Can we stop this?”

“Stop what?” But it’s a stupid question and he knows it, and her lips twist in mild exasperation.

“You know perfectly well. Stop this...” She waves a hand. “Dancing around each other. If you’re doing it because you’re worried about how I feel about it,” she adds, with a very faint edge of uncertainty. “Because I don’t care. It doesn’t matter, it was just a—it was a moment.”

“It wasn’t the first one,” he says softly. The honesty burns deep in his throat like bile. It’s a wonder that he can look at her—and it’s a wonder that this is as easy as it is. “I’ve overstepped.”

Callista sighs. “We were drinking. You especially. You were talking about the Em—about Jessamine. Your mind was elsewhere.”

_Except was it?_ he almost blurts. _Was it? I’m not so sure. I don’t know where it was. I don’t know where it was or what I was doing, or just what it was that I wanted, and it’s not the first time and that frightens me._

Instead: “That doesn’t matter.”

“It _does_.” She folds her arms, her exasperation intensifying. “Corvo, why don’t you care about how I feel?”

He stares at her, momentarily speechless. Why doesn’t he—But it’s _all_ he cares about. It’s why he’s been dodging her this entire time, and it’s why he made her go in the first place. How he must have made her feel.

The apprehension he saw in her eyes, when she was in the bath. How it pierced him and twisted in his guts.

“I do,” he chokes, and she shakes her head again.

“If you did, you’d be satisfied when I told you whatever you did then doesn’t matter to me. Instead you’re—you’re _beating_ yourself over this, and maybe you want to punish yourself for something, I can’t stop that, but whatever that something is, it had better not be _me_. I _don’t want it to be me_.”

She falls silent, raising soil-smeared fingers to her lips. Not aghast at her own raised voice, not upset by it—she clearly doesn’t feel that she’s gone too far, and as far as he’s concerned she hasn’t. And in fact there was something so familiar in her tone then, the cadence and the rhythm of the words, the firmness... and the subtlest hint of fondness.

He’s been spoken to that way more than once, and it aches.

She simply looks thoughtful again.

“If I upset you,” she starts, and he cuts her off almost violently.

“_No_.” He halts, winds it back. She’s calm; he can be calm as well. “No. You didn’t do that. Not at all.”

“Then let it go,” she says, and her voice softens. “This is ridiculous, Corvo, we just... What we were doing, meeting in the evenings like that, it was good. I was enjoying it. I think you were too. Is there any reason to stop?” She gives him a small, faintly sad smile. “Shouldn’t we hold onto what we enjoy these days? Aren’t there few enough of those things? Moments when we can... loosen?”

“I was enjoying it,” he breathes—a little rough. It’s so strange, to say it this bluntly. But it strikes him as merely in keeping with her nature to be blunt when it comes to something like this, at this point with him. “It was like...”

“We were friends,” she finishes. She reaches out and lays her hand on his forearm, the slight pressure through the thick sleeve of his coat. He doesn’t flinch. “It’s been a long time since I really had a friend, Corvo. And no, Emily doesn’t count.”

“_Were_ friends?”

“We are,” she says quietly. “As far as I’m concerned, we are.” Pause. Her hand slips away. “If you still want to be.”

“I do.” Little more than a murmur. It’s as if the chilly breeze has laced his vocal cords with frost like the ground, and a murmur is all he can manage. “I want... That’s it. I wasn’t trying to have... more.”

“I know.” She hesitates then, and it’s not like any of her other pauses. Her face changes oddly in a way he can’t parse, can’t articulate to himself, and it’s not there long enough for him to try. Another blink and she’s as she was. “I told you. Let it go.”

He ducks his head. He can’t promise her he will, not in a way he can keep, so he won’t offer her a promise at all. But he can own that she’s right, that she’s sensible, that he should. That he should try.

She says this is ridiculous and she isn’t wrong.

“All right, then,” she says, with an air of finality. _That’s settled._ “Good. I’m glad.” She nods down at the planting bed. “I haven’t quite finished with this, I should while there’s still enough light.”

He nods again. He’s not precisely relieved that she appears to be concluding this conversation—but suddenly he’s tired, as if something tightly coiled inside him has finally relaxed.

Loosened.

He turns to go. But before he can take a step her voice comes to him again, still low, once more the slightest touch uncertain.

“I’d like to come see you this evening. If I can.”

He half turns, looks back at her with mild surprise. “Of course you can.”

“I’ve missed it,” she says, and then drops her voice even further. She sounds awkward. Close to shy. “I’ve missed you.”

He swallows. All at once the world seems far too still, even with the cries of the gulls wheeling overhead and the distant crash of the waves. His words sound alien in his ears, as if someone else is speaking. But the feeling is all his own.

“I’ve missed you too.”

“You’re a good man, Corvo. I know you don’t think you are, but it’s true.” That sad smile again. “You’ve made mistakes. We all have. Maybe you’ve done some bad things, and maybe you had to or maybe you didn’t always. It doesn’t mean you aren’t a good man.” She lets out a wry laugh. “I wouldn’t want to have anything to do with you if you weren’t.”

He nods. He doesn’t answer. He can’t bear to argue with her, he doubts he would win in any case, and he’s not confident that he knows what winning would mean. But she sounds so positive. And it’s not as though she doesn’t know much of what he’s done.

He’s not altogether certain that she’s right. But he still believes her.

Perhaps, for now, that’s enough to go on.


	8. it’s a sign that someone loves me

He thinks it might have made sense for him to be nervous about this. But he isn’t.

Someone else, he knows, might have felt the need to put special effort into preparing for her. Enhance the space in which he’ll be receiving her, dress it up a bit—clean and straighten, arrange everything just-so, maybe throw some flowers into vases, do everything he can to make it welcoming. Appealing. Not because he’s seeking for some reason to impress her but because this room—_his_ room—was the scene of something he’d rather both of them consign firmly to the past.

But he doesn’t need to cover anything over. He doesn’t need to force some sort of fresh start with decor. She’s made it clear that she wants to let it go.

Not forget it. Not erase it. Merely leave it where it is, pay it no more attention than she feels it deserves, and move on.

In any case, he isn’t some hopeful suitor waiting for a visit from the lady he intends to court. He thinks this calmly, matter-of-fact; he’s not trying to deny anything he fears, not trying to convince himself of some comforting alternate truth. It is the truth. He’s not courting her. There are no advances. That was always the case. No more protests or assurances are required from him.

He missed his friend, she missed him, and she’s coming to see him.

It’s nearly as it was before. He has wine; nothing particularly rare or remarkable, merely a reliable vintage from a reliable vineyard in the low mountains of southern Tyvia. They’ve shared it before, and enjoyed it, and it seems like a good thing to return to. The familiar. The comfortable.

He places the decanter on a tray along with two glasses, sets it before a well-fed fire. That’s all the preparation she ever wanted, and it’s all she’ll want now.

One of the things he’s realizing he always valued most about her is how relatively little she expects of him. Not that she holds him to no standard, but merely that in her eyes, he’s not perched on a pedestal. He’s not the Royal Protector. He’s not the guardian and chief advisor of the young Empress, and he’s not the ruthless insurgent who brought the corrupt interregnum regime to its knees.

He’s a man, with a man’s weakness. With a man’s desire to do better. And all she wants of him now is his amiable company.

The tall clock across the room near his desk chimes, and as if she had only been waiting for her cue, there’s a soft knock at the door.

He turns. Through the glass, her indistinct form. The pale drape of her dressing gown—but this time she resembles no ghost. Her edges may be blurred but she herself is solid and real, and constantly dependable.

She lowers her hand when he crosses to the door, and as he opens it she offers him a faint smile and gathers the folds of her dressing gown closer over her chest. Not defensively at all, not as if she feels the need to place a covering between herself and him. More as if there’s a chill in the air and she’s seeking warmth.

He returns the smile, smaller, and steps aside to let her in.

~

Perhaps she wanted to move forward, set what happened aside and return to where they had been. But it’s clear enough mere moments after she takes her place in the armchair before the fire and accepts the proffered glass of wine that they won’t be returning to anything. Something between them has indeed changed.

And it doesn’t distress him, not the way he might have imagined it would. It’s not tension, not unease. It might be a little awkwardness—but only in the way one is awkward when trying to find one’s footing on uneven ground. Uneven or not, the ground is _there,_ and it’ll support weight as well as ever.

It’s hard to identify precisely where the awkwardness is seated. If it’s in the arrangement of her body or the set of her muscles, it’s too subtle for him to pick out visually. If it’s in her silence... Silence from her during these evening visits is perfectly normal. It signifies nothing other than that she doesn’t feel any urge to speak.

It might, he thinks as he takes his own seat, be in how she’s wrapped her dressing gown around herself—not only her shoulders and middle but over her legs. She still looks as if she’s cold, and he sets down his glass and crouches to lay another couple of logs on the fire. He can’t detect any chill, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any to detect.

In any case, the wine might warm her up soon enough.

“I’m glad I’m here,” she says presently. He glances over his shoulder; she’s holding the stem of her glass between her fingers and rolling it slightly. Idly. Again, that familiar faint smile.

It’s good to see it.

Once more he returns it with one of his own. “I’m glad too.”

She takes a sip, and her smile takes on a wryly amused curve. “Fortunate that I managed to convince you not to be stupid about it.”

He barks a laugh, a little startled but not in the least offended. He doesn’t recall her ever giving him that kind of a friendly jab before. Another good thing, he decides. “If you go on insulting me, I might change my mind.”

“No, you won’t. You know you deserve it.” She releases a long breath—and it sounds as if she’s releasing more than that. “I mean it, though. I didn’t even have to try very hard. Not as hard as I might have thought.”

“You put up a good argument.” He straightens and returns to his chair, takes a swallow of wine. All familiar. Awkward, different... But that doesn’t mean it isn’t comfortable. “All that practice with Emily, I expect.”

“Mm. She’s quite the debater, you probably know that better than I do. It drives me crazy, but honestly I think it’s a trait she’s going to need.” She’s quiet another moment or two, gazing into the fire with thoughtful, gleaming eyes. “It’s not just stubbornness, you know. It’s because she stands up for herself when she believes she’s in the right.”

“Even though a lot of the time she’s not.”

Callista nods. “But she’ll learn to tell the difference. And in the end she always listens.”

“She gets that from her mother.” And then invocation of Jessamine doesn’t hurt the way it might have. The dull red glow of the firelight through the wine makes him think of a sunrise in the Month of Earth, a boat on the Wrenhaven, the clink of glasses, the taste of her mouth.

He thinks of it and this time it almost feels good. Sad, but good. Those were good times. Wonderful times. He should remember them that way. What he loved, not what he lost, because as long as he remembers them he’ll never truly lose them.

“The listening? I’m not so sure,” Callista says, her voice low. “I mean, I know the Empress—Jessamine—she must have been that way. But she’s not the only one.”

He blinks at her, the wine momentarily forgotten. “What are you saying?”

“Why do you think I like coming here? To see you?”

The question strikes him as a non sequitur. He blinks again, dimly confused. Even dimmer, uncomfortable; why is she asking this now? Is she looking for a particular answer? Is she expecting something from him after all?

All he can be is honest. “I don’t know.”

“All right,” she says, patiently. “So why do _you_ like it when I come to see you?”

This question isn’t any more comfortable than the other. He picks it out of the air between them and turns it over in his mind, perplexed. There must _be_ a reason, likely more than one, but when it comes to his feelings, his ability to articulate has always fled and left nothing behind. To himself, to others—Jessamine must have sensed that, because she never asked him to explain any of his heart. She accepted it when he tried to show her rather than tell her.

Except that he loved her. He was able to tell her that.

He loved her and he would never leave her.

“It’s all right,” Callista says gently. “There’s no right answer. Just try.”

He swallows. It hits him that one answer, in fact, rests in what she just said. And in what he was musing over before she knocked on his door.

“You don’t... _expect_ things,” he says slowly. A bit haltingly. “You don’t want anything from me. You want to be here. You want to talk.” He shrugs. Now that he’s started, it’s coming a little easier. Although he can’t quite meet her eyes. “Or not talk, not all the time. Listen.”

“It’s the same for me.”

He does meet her eyes, then, as abruptly and fully as if she’s taken hold of his focus and brought it insistently to her. She’s looking back at him with perfect openness and that tiny smile, warm in the gold of the firelight. All of her, warm. In a sudden rush he’s so glad that she’s here.

“You listen, Corvo. Not just because you’re not always sure what to say. You _listen_. You do it because you want to. Do you know when anyone last really listened to anything I had to say? When I wasn’t teaching, that is.” She shakes her head and her smile becomes both fond and the slightest bit regretful. “Cecelia was sort of a friend, as much as anyone could be, but we weren’t close. So I don’t know. I don’t know what the last time anyone listened to me was. Before you.”

Now he can’t put a name to what he sees in her eyes, in the tilt of her mouth. He knows only that it’s deep. He watches her, and he doesn’t have the first notion what to say.

And that’s all right.

“You care,” she says. “You always have. I don’t think anyone else really sees how much you care, except Emily. And she’s still too young to understand all of it. If you don’t speak much, it’s not that you don’t feel.”

He looks away, slightly embarrassed in the directionless, ambient manner one is embarrassed when someone else is talking about them and saying nice things that do not remotely sound like empty praise. Callista doesn’t sound like she’s praising him at all. She’s merely saying what she sees.

As she told him, the last time she was here, what she saw when she first encountered him.

“Corvo...” She trails off, hesitant, and when he looks at her again she’s gazing down at her glass, her teeth worrying at her lower lip. It’s not exactly nervousness, he can discern that much, but it’s something akin to that. She has something she wants to say, but she’s concerned about what it might mean.

She’s concerned about what it might do.

He sees her too. He sees her in a way probably very few other people ever have. A servant, a governess, a woman of function and station and little else. All the idiocy Wallace used to prattle about in his stiffly snobbish way. Some of it is that she’s concealed so much of her personhood from the world. She has her work, and she confines herself to that.

But with him, for some reason, it’s different. It’s always been different.

He sets his glass side and sits forward. “What is it?”

_You wouldn’t want me to be afraid to tell you. Don’t be afraid to tell me._

“I asked you once,” she says slowly, as if each word requires careful consideration, “whether you thought you could ever be with anyone again.” She raises her head. Her eyes are shining, brighter than ever. “I don’t think you ever answered me.”

He pulls in a breath. He remembers it as soon as she says it, and he also remembers that she’s correct: he never did answer. Not because he was seeking some way to avoid doing so, merely that he didn’t. She spoke about the man she was planning to marry, and the conversation seemed to drift away from him.

But when it comes to herself, he supposes she answered her own question.

_That life is over. I can’t go back to it. The woman who might have done those things, the woman who wanted to find someone to love me and be with him for the rest of my days. This is my life now._

Jessamine’s smile. The rich smoky texture of her laugh. The firm level tone she used when—yes—she knew she was in the right. The tendril of dark hair just behind her left ear which always seemed to escape her otherwise neatly coiled bun. The glossy waves of it spread across her pillow in the moonlight, how it tangled around his fingers. The scent of rosewater when he kissed her hands, the softness of the skin beneath his lips. The excited blush in her cheeks the first time she kissed him, her boldness and her daring. The sweet wonder of watching her grow into the magnificent woman she became. The simple pleasure of fulfilling her commands, of knowing that he pleased her. The serene happiness that permeated every cell of her when she first held Emily in her arms.

The unbearable weight of her when she died in his.

“No,” he says softly. “I will never love again.”

There was only ever one woman for him. And she’s gone. The clockwork simulacrum of her heart is resting in its chest at the foot of his bed and its gears still turn, but it’s not her. It’s a fragment of her soul trapped in a cage of glass and metal and muscle. It’s a whisper of her memory.

Callista nods, as if this is what she expected to hear.

Silence between them—brief, but it extends beyond its measure. Her fingers toy with the neckline of her dressing gown. The fire crackles, bursts a shower of sparks up the chimney. The wine is mellow on his tongue. The Tower is quiet all around them. He has no doubt at all that in her bed, Emily is sleeping peacefully and dreaming good dreams. He’s thinking about nothing much at all, and it’s an inexpressible relief, and he suspects that he would have found it nearly impossible to achieve this level of inner stillness without her sitting near him.

Yet something feels unfinished. Poised on an edge.

“The man I was going to marry,” Callista says at last. Corvo shifts his gaze to her; she’s set down her empty glass and she’s sitting erect, straight but not stiff, like she’s preparing to move. “I told you about him.”

“Yes.”

“How he died at sea.”

Corvo nods. Inside him, in depths almost beyond reckoning, a long-sleeping part of him is stirring. Flexing. “I remember.”

“When he was gone, I felt so... empty.” She takes a breath. “It wasn’t just that I loved him. It was that my whole life disappeared. Maybe it was worse because he never came back at all. It was like he took my heart to the bottom of the ocean with him. Sometimes I think that’s why no one really listens to me. I don’t have a heart anymore. How can someone be _real_ without a heart?”

He doesn’t know what to say. So he says nothing. He does what she said he does and he listens, and he notes the tears shining in her eyes and he aches and remembers how much he wanted to reach for her—not as a lover but simply to establish her reality and her presence, hold her against him for no other reason than to feel her.

To feel that he isn’t alone.

Now: Maybe to prove to her that she isn’t alone either.

Slowly, deliberately, she rises and comes toward him, and as she does she releases the folds of her dressing down and he glimpses her knee and thigh beneath the white silk.

Bare skin.

She stops in front of him, gazing down with her hands against the tie at her waist. Her features are thin and strong, and somehow strange. Half of her is firelit and half is in shadow, but even the shadowed part of her body is luminous, as if the light from the fire is entering through her skin and permeating every part of her. The room around them no longer feels as if it’s a defined space with walls and a ceiling, and instead they’re a small floating island of brightness in a night more incomprehensibly vast than the Void. She, not the fire, is the center of that brightness.

She isn’t empty, whatever she says.

“I’ll never get my heart back, Corvo,” she says softly. “I know that. It’s all right. But I’m so tired of it. I don’t want to feel that way anymore. I want to feel real. Just... just for a little while.”

Her fingers have been working at the tie and now she has it loose, and with a calm ripple at the edges of his nerves he knows what this is. And for once he won’t have to fumble for an answer.

“I’m not asking you to love me. I don’t think I even want that. But will you help me? Will you be with me?” She reaches up, lifts the silk off her bare shoulders and lets it slip down her upper arms. “Will you fill me?”

The dressing gown falls.

The first time he saw Jessamine’s naked body, it was astonishing. He had seen women before, had been with women; she wasn’t anything like his first. But there was no one like her, and when he first saw her standing over him as he stretched out on her bed, her pale skin even paler in the spill of moonlight and every line and every curve exquisite perfection, all he could do was stare and struggle to remember how to breathe.

Callista is so different, this is _all_ so different; her hips and thighs are full curves but she’s lean overall, her waist slim, her breasts small, her arms and belly somehow more muscular than he would have expected. The sharper angles of her face, her expression briefly lost in the shadows that drape half of her. There’s a hardness in her, and he finds himself thinking of whaling ships and her yearning to be on them, on the sea where she lost her heart, and how well her lean strength would fit there.

He doesn’t want it to be like it was with Jessamine. And it isn’t. But as he gazes up at her, he understands that he does want this. He does want to give her what she’s asking.

He does want her.

He reaches for her, for her hands, and she sighs as he tugs her gently into his lap.

She sinks down unhesitatingly, almost eagerly, and settles. She’s straddling him, pressed against his chest, and she curls her arms around his neck and lays her head on his shoulder as he encircles her middle, his hands splayed over her shoulderblades. The slight jut of them beneath his palms; more muscle over the bones but not even much of that. He’s oddly entranced by these details, and they’re not the details a man might notice when overcome by lust—because he isn’t. She cants her hips forward just a bit, sighs again and rolls, and he feels himself hardening under the pressure, but the heat kindling between his legs is background. What he’s most aware of his the simple fact of her body. Her weight. He’s merely holding her, hugging her, lifting a hand to pull loose the band securing her hair and comb the strands free with his fingers.

There’s barely any lust at all. And he doesn’t sense any in her. That’s not what she asked for. Nor did she ask for a lover. So strange, to ask to be taken to bed as a friend.

Yet that’s what she’s done.

He doesn’t kiss her when she raises her head. She doesn’t try to kiss him. He nuzzles her jaw, the hollow of her throat, and she nuzzles back and he feels the edge of a smile brushing his ear.

“Corvo...” She pushes back a little, studying him with grave eyes. Licks her lips. She shouldn’t be apprehensive, especially after what he’s done, but suddenly she is. “You don’t have to do it. I should have asked first, I—“

“Stop.” He frames her face, tips it down and kisses her brow. Bizarrely funny now, that she would be in the position to apologize for something like this. “I want to.”

_Stop hurting, my love. Or at the very least, stop hurting alone._

He hooks her thighs over his hips as he levers to his feet; she’s light and small in his arms, and his strength is no longer only human, and it’s easy to carry her to the bed and lay her carefully down. She loosens as he does and pushes up on her elbows, watching him unfasten his shirt and shrug it off. It’s astonishing how unselfconscious he is. His back and shoulders bear the worst of the scars but they didn’t spare his chest and stomach, and although the light this far from the fire is dim and dancing, the dark slashes and burns and raised stripes of toughened tissue stand out stark and inescapable.

She sits up a little further and runs her fingertips down his ribs, and he closes his eyes and breathes. She touches him and he doesn’t fall apart. She touches him and he tenses under it—and bit by bit he releases, and over the memory of the pain is washing a heavy and ineffable sweetness.

She’s already seen him. There’s nothing here she doesn’t accept.

Another few seconds and he’s shed his trousers and smallclothes. He doesn’t need to lust for her to be ready for her, and his cock bobs stiff and free and glistening when he slides his smallclothes down his hips. He hears her draw a sharp breath and straightens to see her slipping her hand between her thighs, twitching, moaning as her knees open.

Her fingers gleaming, the soft wet sound when she pushes them into her cunt and her head lolls, her lips parted. “_Oh_—Corvo.”

He could do this slowly. But he intuits that _slow_ isn’t what she wants. She scoots back and he crawls over her, kneeling, licking a finger and joining it to hers. She’s slick and hot, and she falls back and releases a low cry when he enters her—his single finger is easily as thick as two of hers. He curls it slightly upward, and she cries out again and rocks up to meet him and gropes for his wrist, her breasts quivering. He could stop, he could go ahead and fuck her, but for a few moments he fucks her this way instead and watches, fascinated, the full-body expression of her pleasure, and once more makes a comparison that should be nearly unbearable.

It isn’t. He merely appreciates the distinctions. She moves differently in response to what he does. Her sounds are rougher and deeper, more ragged, and there’s a desperation in them that he never heard in Jessamine. She is desperate, gripping him although she’s not pleading with him, and he can’t hold back for long.

He withdraws his finger, brings it to his mouth and tastes her cunt, and it’s different and it’s good.

“Come on,” she breathes, and incredibly she’s smiling at him, reaching down and taking him in her hand—stroking, thumbing his foreskin over the head, and he trembles and whimpers. He never imagined it was possible to want someone like this. “Fuck me.”

The simplest request imaginable. So he does.

She cries out again the first time he thrusts into her and clings to him, nails digging into his shoulders, and for a few seconds the strain in her voice makes him worried that he’s hurt her somehow. But she cups the nape of his neck and leans up, her forehead pressed to his. Their lips are so close, practically brushing, but kissing her still feels wrong. It should be ridiculous, his cock deep in her and yet he doesn’t want to kiss her, but it couldn’t feel more right. It couldn’t feel more like what he needs, what he’s needed for months.

He slides an arm under her and shifts her more securely against him, starts to move.

Slow at first—slow but firm, just short of hard: long grunting thrusts that she arches into. Her arms are once more circled around his neck and her legs hooked over the backs of his thighs, her face burrowing into the juncture of his throat and shoulder and her teeth bared against his collarbone, her short breaths warm and twisting into groans and her cunt clenching around him every time he bottoms out. Lust or not, desire or not, she feels so _amazing_ and he wishes so much that he could tell her, wishes he could describe to her the incredible relief that washes through him with every buck of his hips.

How safe he feels in this moment, inside her. Like he can finally rest.

Perhaps he doesn’t need to say anything. Perhaps it’s only the same thing she’s feeling.

He doesn’t know when he last brought himself to orgasm, but that’s not all of why it doesn’t take him long. She’s urging him, whispering to him that she wants to see him come, wants to see him feeling that good—that he _should_ feel that way, after all this pain and loneliness he _deserves_ to feel good, deserves all the pleasure he’s taking in her. He didn’t say no to her before and he won’t now; a few more uneven thrusts and he wrenches out of her and works himself furiously with his fist, muffling his shout with gritted teeth and spilling hot onto her belly.

Crouches over her, panting, his head hanging between his shoulders. Waiting, maybe, to feel guilty.

He opens his eyes and looks down at her sliding her fingers through the streaks of semen, and he doesn’t feel anything of the kind.

~

She hasn’t come and she should, but for a little while all she seems to want is to hold him and be held, curled against him and stroking his hair as he floats back down into an all-pervading calm. She murmurs something that might be his name, might be another’s, and it doesn’t matter which it is.

He can rest.

He pulls the covers up over them both and thinks he dozes for a time. She might as well. The fire burns down, not much more than coals. Later—he doesn’t know how much—he disentangles himself and rolls on top of her, catches the glitter of her eyes as he nudges her thighs apart with his knee.

He could probably manage to fuck her again, should she request that of him. But he’s maneuvering over her and down, lips gliding over her chest and across one breast, pausing to playfully flick her nipple with his tongue and smiling when she shivers and lets out a shaky laugh.

Now that they’ve come this far, now that he’s settling between her legs and sealing his lips over her clit and sucking lightly, he can see how this might be not quite so desperate. How it might be smoother and less hurried, more relaxed.

She laughed when he flicked her nipple. It’s insane but he can see how, eventually, this might be _fun_.

With Jessamine he loved doing this particular thing, and he’s discovering that he doesn’t enjoy it any less now. Nor does his skill seem to have atrophied much; Callista whines and moans, kicks weakly at the sheets and twines her fingers into his hair, curses him when he eases off just as he can sense her racing toward the edge. And eventually he does take pity on her and sends her flying with broad, insistent laps, her suppressing her wail with a hand jammed over her mouth.

He lays his head on her inner thigh and licks her off his lips. Feels her coiled muscles go lax and exhausted. This time he’s certain she murmurs his name.

Eventually she tugs him back up and snuggles into his arms, and scarcely minutes later the heavy, slow breathing of full sleep is unmistakable.

But he doesn’t sleep. He lies awake, his leg nestled between hers and her arm slung across his waist, and he marvels vaguely at how comfortable every part of it is. It’s as though the fear and the shame and even the awkwardness have been relegated to some other life. As if when she stepped into his room tonight she was stepping through more than one kind of door, and when she let the dressing gown pool at her feet she removed more than one kind ofbarrier between them.

It was always pointless, any fear and shame he’s ever felt with her. It was stupid. The bath... The man who did that to her isn’t gone, but that frightened, bewildered creature is not all he is.

This is who he is too. A man she came to, sought comfort in—and she invited him to seek the same comfort in her.

He gazes up at the glass arched high over them; through it, a few faint stars are scattered across a field of blue-black fading into a lightening indigo. The last of the night is leaving them.

So long since anyone has slept in his bed but him.

She turns in his arms and presses herself into the inward curve of his body, hums drowsily when he slides an arm over her. He falls asleep with the swell of her breast cupped in his palm and the clean scent of her hair in every inhale.

She said she didn’t want him to love her. But he does. He understands that now. He isn’t in love with her, but he loves her. He loves her in a way he doesn’t think he’s ever loved anyone.

Not his lover. His friend.

His best.

~

“I always wanted to ask about this.”

He blinks, turns his head to look at her. She’s lying against his side, her head pillowed on his shoulder, and tracing a fingertip over the back of his left hand where it rests on his chest.

Tracing the Mark.

They slept for only a few hours. Shortly after dawn they found themselves awake again, and they’ve been lying together in companionable silence as light flows gradually into the room and chases the remaining shadows away. Touching now and then, idle caresses and affectionate little nuzzles, but mostly nothing at all and not needing more.

But now she’s speaking, and the way she’s touching him is far from idle.

She flicks her eyes up to his, back to the Mark. As always, she’s not demanding anything; if he shakes her off and makes it clear that he doesn’t want to talk about it, she won’t pry. But that doesn’t mean she’s going to conceal her curiosity.

He muses, watching her map the black curves and swirls and spikes. What would she do if he told her? Not run off and report him to the new High Overseer, or even be disturbed; he’s absolutely confident about that. In any case she already knows more than enough to make trouble for him if she were so inclined. She might not have seen the full extent of his witchcraft, not thus far, but even if he hadn’t frozen time that evening with her, she knows he possesses it.

She must know the Mark is part of it.

“The Outsider gave it to me,” he says simply, and she raises her head again—and he can detect no surprise in her expression or her affect.

“You’re a witch.”

He shrugs, as much as he can while reclining. “I suppose that’s one word for it.”

She cocks her head. She’s still looking at him, but her fingers are moving again. “Do you still... speak to him?”

“I haven’t since we took back the throne.” He exhales. “I think I might not be as interesting as I was.”

She nods, taking this in. Her eyes are dark and serious as ever. “The Abbey says the Outsider’s power can only be used for evil. Now I know they’re wrong.”

He frowns slightly. “How’s that?”

“You used it to restore the throne,” she says, quiet. “You used it to save Emily. You saved Dunwall. You saved the whole Empire. Thousands of lives, maybe tens of thousands. Maybe even more. That’s not evil. It couldn’t be less evil.”

“I murdered men.” Not a protest; only pointing out another fact. “I killed them when I didn’t have to. And I didn’t always kill them quickly, because I wanted them to suffer. I _enjoyed_ their suffering. Isn’t that evil?”

“I told you already. You’ve done bad things. I know that. It doesn’t make you a bad man.” She lowers her head and presses her lips to his knuckles. “You aren’t going to make me think you are, so you might as well stop trying.”

“I’m not trying to do that.” Now it is a protest, but not an especially forceful one.

She leans up, rests her head on her hand. “So what are you doing, then?”

“I’m not sure.” Fingers combing through her hair again, smoothing the tousled honey-brown strands. “Maybe I’m just trying to work something out.”

“You can do that.” She gives him a faint smile, shifts again, rests her head once more on his chest. Her palm flat over his heart. “Just so long as you know what you can’t do.”

They’re quiet again. The room continues to brighten, and in the distance he can hear voices in the corridor. It’s not yet late, but soon—too soon—they’re going to have to rise and dress and leave whatever they’ve made this place between them, and go back out into a far more difficult world.

But he suspects they’ll be able to return here. When they want to.

“You’ve been through so much,” she murmurs. “More than anyone knows.”

He holds her a little closer and sighs. “That’s not completely true.” Not anymore. In any case, so has she. And he knows.

They both do.


	9. a bright white beautiful heaven hanging over me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we are at the end. Thanks so much for reading this weird little thing, I hope it’s been enjoyable. It’s been very gratifying to write. ❤️❤️

“Emily!”

Corvo looks up from the report he’s reading—Curnow’s overview of the City Watch left in service and the degree to which most of them can be counted on, as well as a general state-of-Dunwall regarding the more unruly districts and the periodically warring gangs that still largely rule the streets there. It’s a good report, thorough and well-organized, and he’s been routinely pleased, over the course of the last few weeks, to find that his faith in Curnow as his chief operative in the city hasn’t been misplaced.

He doubts Curnow would enjoy being referred to as a _spy_. But Corvo is beginning to recognize that as one of the reasons he’s right for the job.

Curnow is also setting down his coffee and looking, following the direction from which the call came, the corner of his mouth twitching as he suppresses a smile. Callista’s exasperation is undisguised and pure—or it would be, if it wasn’t undergirded with such obvious affection. She’s at the opposite end of this level of the gardens and peering over the wall down to the lower terrace, where Emily is darting through the shrubbery and swinging her blunted practice sword at enemies only she can see. The bows in her hair are askew and she’s smudged her trousers and cheeks with dirt, and even at this distance Corvo can read the glee on her face.

Awareness, and mischievous intention in it. She can hear her own name perfectly well and she means to ignore it right up until the last moment before genuine punishment is handed down.

Not that it would be terribly harsh punishment. An additional lengthy essay, most likely, on one of the more spectacularly dull books in the schoolroom’s library.

Callista throws up her hands and spins on her heel, stalks to a table piled high with books and drops into a chair. For a few seconds she maintains her annoyance and then she shakes her head, chuckles.

“Her moods have been a bit lighter of late,” Curnow observes. His gaze flicks to Corvo. “Or so it appears to me. You see her more often than I do.”

“I’d noticed,” Corvo murmurs. He scans the last of the report, sets it down and picks up his coffee. “But it’s nice to have someone else confirm it.”

Curnow grunts thoughtfully and munches the last of the crumpet balanced on the edge his saucer. “Perhaps it’s the change in season.”

It might be. In the last week the chill has broken and the wind sweeping off the sea has warmed. The sun itself seems brighter. Several days ago Corvo noticed rows of green shoots poking their furled heads up through the thawing soil of the planting beds. The entire city is beginning to emerge from itself, stretching and blinking in the welcoming light.

Today is exceptionally fine.

He glances at Callista again—lingers, although not so long that Curnow might start to wonder, even as perceptive as he is. She’s leaning back in her chair, her legs casually crossed as she sips her own coffee. The buffeting wind of the past weeks has gentled into a fresh breeze, and loose strands of hair play around her face. All of her is looser now. Less proper. Less purposefully neat.

She’s been staring out at the water, her eyes distant, but she must sense his attention, because her focus shifts to him. She gives him a hint of a smile.

Gentle and warm as the day itself.

She still visits him almost every night. She comes and they sample whatever drink he’s selected and keep each other company, and sometimes they talk and sometimes they say nothing at all. Nothing is expected. Nothing is required. Everything between them is so utterly devoid of effort, like releasing a breath into softness.

As soft as she is on the occasions when they go to bed together. Effortless then as well. It doesn’t happen frequently; that too is neither expected nor required. It’s given freely and freely enjoyed. They can read each other, discern when one or both of them would benefit from that sort of comfort.

Comfort, and pleasure and—yes, as he thought—_fun_. And the ease of untroubled sleep.

It’s a strange friendship, but as true as any he’s ever had.

“You as well,” Curnow says quietly.

Corvo looks up again, brow slightly furrowed. “Hm?”

“Your moods. They’re lighter than they were.” Curnow tilts his head, his expression considering. “As I said, it must be the weather.”

“Must be.” Corvo hands back the report. “Thank you for this, Captain. You’ve done an admirable job pulling things into shape.”

Curnow huffs. “They’re far from that. We’ve a long way to go yet. But I appreciate your kindness, my Lord.”

“It’s not just kindness. I mean what I say.” Corvo gestures at the folded papers with his coffee cup. “I’ve placed a great deal of faith in you, Curnow. I didn’t expect you to let me down. You haven’t. I don’t believe that’ll change.”

Curnow ducks his head. His mingled gratification and faint embarrassment are plain, and he clears his throat as he gets to his feet, bows. “My Lord Protector.”

Corvo nods at the plate of crumpets. “You won’t take more?”

“Thank you, my Lord, but no. I have a group of recruits to address in an hour or so and I should review my notes.” Half a wry smile. “I’m trusting they’re not quite as hopeless as they appear.”

Corvo gives him another nod—close to a small bow of his own, though he doesn’t stand.

And Curnow doesn’t go. He remains where he is, once more regarding Corvo with that coolly searching gaze. Corvo looks back at him, and doesn’t demand to be told what he’s being searched for.

Part of him already knows.

“I’m glad she has you,” Curnow says finally, low. “I’m glad you have each other. It’s right.”

He turns without another word and walks away.

Corvo runs a finger idly around the rim of the cup, tips his head back and watches a flock—a _murder, _it’s called a murder, which for some reason strikes him as funny—of crows wheeling and swooping around the turrets and balconies of Dunwall Tower and crying their harsh, somehow jovial cries. As if in response, Emily shouts in triumph as she vanquishes yet another fearsome foe, and Callista’s laughter echoes off the stone.

Yes, it might be the weather that has them feeling this way. The thaw. But he suspects that even when the cold winds return, they won’t freeze him—or Emily, or Callista.

This odd patchwork of a family, they’ll all keep each other warm.


End file.
